S 521 

.B16 

1919 



I 



1 THE 

HOLY EARTH 



?i L.H.BAILEY M 




Qass. 



Book 



THE HOLY EARTH 



THE BACKGROUND BOOKS 

The Philosophy of the Holy Earth 



THE HOLY EARTH 
WIND AND WEATHER (Verse) 
UNIVERSAL SERVICE 
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 



THE 

HOLY EARTH 



JA BY 

i/h/>^bailey 



Published by L. H. BAILEY 

THE COMSTOCK PUBLISHING CO., Agents 

ITHACA. N. Y. 

1919 






COPTKIGHT, 1915 

By L. H. BAILEY 

To r«y;J:¥ce loct 00-^7 



THE 8CRIBNER PRE88 
NEW YORK 



Contents 

VAaa 

First, The Statement: Pages 1-16 

In the beginning •• 5 

The earth is good 7 

It is kindly 10 

The earth is holy 14 

Second, The Consequences: Pages 17-171 _ ^ 

The habit of destruction 18 

The new hold 22 

The brotherhood relation 30 

The farmer's relation 32 

The underlying training of a people 39 

The neighbor's access to the earth 42 

The subdividing of the land 48 

A new map 55 

The public program • • . 61 

The honest day's work 66 

The group reaction 70 

The spiritual contact with nature 75 

The struggle for existence: war 80 

The daily fare 90 

The admiration of good materials 103 

The keeping of the beautiful earth 115 

V 



Contents 

PAOB 

The tones of industry 120 

The threatened literature 124 

The separate soul 130 

The element of separateness in society , . . . 136 

The democratic basis in agriculture 139 

The backgroimd spaces. — The forest 150 

A forest background for a reformatory .... 156 

The background spaces. — The open fields . . . 164 

The background spaces. — The ancestral sea . . . 167 



VI 



THE HOLY EARTH 



THE HOLY EARTH 

First, the Statement 

So BOUNTIFUL hath been the earth and so se- 
curely have we drawn from it our substance, that 
we have taken it all for granted as if it were only 
a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of 
the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very 
much considered the essential relation that we bear 
to it as living parts in the vast creation. 

It is good to think of ourselves — of this teeming, 
tense, and aspiring human race — as a helpful and 
contributing part in the plan of a cosmos, and as 
participators in some far-reaching destiny. The 
idea of responsibility is much asserted of late, but 
we relate it mostly to the attitude of persons in 
the realm of conventional conduct, which we have 
come to regard as very exclusively the realm of 
morals; and we have established certain formalities 
that satisfy the conscience. But there is some 
deeper relation than all this, which we must rec- 
ognize and the consequences of which we must 
practise. There is a directer and more personal ob- 

1 



The Holy Earth 

ligation than that which expends itself in loyalty 
to the manifold organizations and social require- 
ments of the present day. There is a more funda- 
mental co-operation in the scheme of things than 
that which deals with the proprieties or which cen- 
tres about the selfishness too often expressed in the 
salvation of one's soul. 

We can be only onlookers on that part of the 
cosmos that we call the far heavens, but it is pos- 
sible to co-operate in the processes on the surface 
of the sphere. This co-operation may be conscious 
and definite, and also useful to the earth; that 
is, it may be real. What means this contact with 
our natural situation, this relationship to the earth 
to which we are born, and what signify this new 
exploration and conquest of the planet and these ac- 
cumulating prophecies of science ? Does the moth- 
ership of the earth have any real meaning to us ? 

All this does not imply a relation only with ma- 
terial and physical things, nor any effort to sub- 
stitute a nature religion. Our relation with the 
planet must be raised into the realm of spirit; we 
cannot be fully useful otherwise. We must find a 
way to maintain the emotions in the abounding 
commercial civilization. There are two kinds of ma- 
terials, — those of the native earth and the idols of 
one's hands. The latter are much in evidence in 
modern life, with the conquests of engineering, 

2 



The Contact 

mechanics, architecture, and all the rest. We vis- 
uaUze them everywhere, and particularly in the 
great centres of population. The tendency is to be 
removed farther and farther from the everlasting 
backgrounds. Our religion is detached. 

We come out of the earth and we have a right to 
the use of the materials; and there is no danger of 
crass materialism if we recognize the original ma- 
terials as divine and if we understand our proper 
relation to the creation, for then will gross selfish- 
ness in the use of them be removed. This will 
necessarily mean a better conception of property 
and of one's obligation in the use of it. We shall 
conceive of the earth, which is the common habi- 
tation, as inviolable. One does not act rightly to- 
ward one's fellows if one does not know how to act 
rightly toward the earth. 

Nor does this close regard for the mother earth 
imply any loss of mysticism or of exaltation: quite 
the contrary. Science but increases the mystery of 
the unknown and enlarges the boundaries of the 
spiritual vision. To feel that one is a useful and 
co-operating part in nature is to give one kinship, 
and to open the mind to the great resources and 
the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental 
common relations. Here arise also the great emo- 
tions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of 
majesty and awe, the unllft of vast desires,— when 

3 



The Holy Earth 

one contemplates the earth and the universe and 
desires to take them into the soul and to express 
oneself in their terms; and here also the respon- 
sible practices of life take root. 

So much are we now involved in problems of 
human groups, so persistent are the portrayals of 
our social afflictions, and so well do we magnify our 
woes by insisting on them, so much in sheer weari- 
ness do we provide antidotes to soothe our feelings 
and to cause us to forget by means of many empty 
diversions, that we may neglect to express ourselves 
in simple free personal joy and to separate the obli- 
gation of the individual from the irresponsibilities 
of the mass. 



In the beginning 

It suits my purpose to quote the first sentence in 
the Hebrew Scripture: In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth. 

This is a statement of tremendous reach, intro- 
ducing the cosmos; for it sets forth in the fewest 
words the elemental fact that the formation of the 
created earth lies above and before man, and that 
therefore it is not man's but God's. Man finds him- 
self upon it, with many other creatures, all parts 
in some system which, smce it is beyond man and 
superior to him, is divine. 

Yet the planet was not at once complete when 
life had appeared upon it. The whirling earth goes 
through many vicissitudes; the conditions on its 
fruitful surface are ever-changing; and the forms of 
life must meet the new conditions: so does the cre- 
ation continue, and every day sees the genesis in 
process. All life contends, sometimes ferociously 
but more often bloodlessly and benignly, and the 
contention results in momentary equilibrium, one set 
of contestants balancing another; but every change 
in the outward conditions destroys the equation and 
a new status results. Of all the disturbing living 
factors, man is the greatest. He sets mighty changes 

5 



The Holy Earth 

going, destroying forests, upturning the sleeping 
prairies, flooding the deserts, deflecting the courses 
of the rivers, building great cities. He operates 
consciously and increasingly with plan aforethought; 
and therefore he carries heavy responsibility. 

This responsibility is recognized in the Hebrew 
Scripture, from which I have quoted; and I quote 
it again because I know of no other Scripture that 
states it so well. Man is given the image of the 
creator, even when formed from the dust of the 
earth, so complete is his power and so real his do- 
minion: And God blessed them: and God said unto 
them. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the 
earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the 
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and 
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 

One cannot receive all these privileges without 
bearing the obligation to react and to partake, to 
keep, to cherish, and to co-operate. We have as- 
sumed that there is no obligation to an inanimate 
thing, as we consider the earth to be: but man 
should respect the conditions in which he is placed; 
the earth yields the living creature; man is a living 
creature; science constantly narrows the gulf be- 
tween the animate and the inanimate, between the 
organized and the inorganized; evolution derives the 
creatures from the earth; the creation is one creation. 
I must accept all or reject all. 

6 



The earth is good 

It is good to live. We talk of death and of life- 
lessness, but we know only of life. Even our 
prophecies of death are prophecies of more life. 
We know no better world: whatever else there 
may be is of things hoped for, not of things seen. 
The objects are here, not hidden nor far to seek: 
And God saw everything that he had made, and, 
behold, it was very good. 

These good things are the present things and the 
living things. The account is silent on the things 
that w^ere not created, the chaos, the darkness, the 
abyss. Plato, in the "Republic," reasoned that the 
works of the creator must be good because the 
creator is good. This goodness is in the essence of 
things; and we sadly need to make it a part in our 
philosophy of life. The earth is the scene of our 
life, and probably the very source of it. The heaven, 
so far as human beings know, is the source only of 
death; in fact, we have peopled it with the dead. 
We have built our philosophy on the dead. 

We seem to have overlooked the goodness of the 
earth in the establishing of our affairs, and even in 
our philosophies. It is reserved as a theme for 

7 



The Holy Earth 

preachers and for poets. And yet, the goodness of 
tlie planet is the basic fact in our existence. 

I am not speaking of good in an abstract way, in 
the sense in which some of us suppose the creator 
to have expressed himself as pleased or satisfied 
with his work. The earth is good in itself, and its 
products are good in themselves. The earth sus- 
tains all things. It satisfies. It matters not whether 
this satisfaction is the result of adaptation in the 
process of evolution; the fact remains that the 
creation is good. 

To the common man the earth propounds no sys- 
tem of philosophy or of theology. The man makes 
his own personal contact, deals with the facts as 
they are or as he conceives them to be, and is not 
swept into any system. He has no right to assume 
a bad or evil earth, although it is difiicult to cast 
off the hindrance of centuries of teaching. When 
he is properly educated he will get a new resource 
from his relationships. 

It may be difficult to demonstrate this goodness. 
In the nature of things we must assume it, although 
we know that we could not subsist on a sphere of 
the opposite quaUties. The important considera- 
tion is that we appreciate it, and this not in any 
sentimental and impersonal way. To every bird 
the air is good; and a man knows it is good if he is 
worth being a man. To every fish the water is 

8 



The Earth is Good 

good. To every beast its food is good, and its time 
of sleep is good. The creatures experience that 
Hfe is good. Every man in his heart knows that 
there is goodness and wholeness in the rain, in 
the wind, the soil, the sea, the glory of sunrise, 
in the trees, and in the sustenance that we derive 
from the planet. When we grasp the significance 
of this situation, we shall forever supplant the re- 
ligion of fear with a religion of consent. 

We are so accustomed to these essentials — to the 
rain, the wind, the soil, the sea, the sunrise, the 
trees, the sustenance — that we may not include 
them in the categories of the good things, and we 
endeavor to satisfy ourselves with many small and 
trivial and exotic gratifications; and when these 
gratifications fail or pall, we find ourselves helpless 
and resourceless. The joy of sound sleep, the relish 
of a sufficient meal of plain and wholesome food, the 
desire to do a good day's work and the recompense 
when at night we are tired from the doing of it, the 
exhilaration of fresh air, the exercise of the natural 
powers, the mastery of a situation or a problem, — 
these and many others like them are fundamental 
satisfactions, beyond all pampering and all toys, 
and they are of the essence of goodness. I think 
we should teach all children how good are the com- 
mon necessities, and how very good are the things 
that are made in the beginning. 

9 



It is kindly' 

We hear much about man being at the mercy of 
nature, and the Hteralist will contend that there can 
be no holy relation under such conditions. But so 
is man at the mercy of God. 

It is a blasphemous practice that speaks of the hos- 
tility of the earth, as if the earth were full of menaces 
and cataclysms. The old fear of nature, that peo- 
pled the earth and sky with imps and demons, and 
that gave a future state to Satan, yet possesses the 
minds of men, only that we may have ceased to 
personify and to demonize our fears, although we 
still persistently contrast what we call the evil and 
the good. Still do we attempt to propitiate and 
appease the adversaries. Still do we carry the ban 
of the early philosophy that assumed materials 
and '^the flesh*' to be evil, and that found a way 
of escape only in renunciation and asceticism. 

Nature cannot be antagonistic to man, seeing 
that man is a product of nature. We should find 
vast joy in the fellowship, something like the joy 
of Pan. We should feel the relief when we no 
longer apologize for the creator because of the 
things that are made. 

10 



It is Kindly 

It is true that there are devastations of flood and 
fire and frost, scourge of disease, and appalling con- 
vulsions of earthquake and eruption. But man 
prospers; and we know that the catastrophes are 
greatly fewer than the accepted boimties. We have 
no choice but to abide. No growth comes from 
hostility. It would undoubtedly be a poor human 
race if all the pathway had been plain and easy. 

The contest with nature is wholesome, particu- 
larly when pursued in sympathy and for mastery. 
It is worthy a being created in God's image. The 
earth is perhaps a stern earth, but it is a kindly 
earth. 

Most of our difficulty with the earth lies in the 
effort to do what perhaps ought not to be done. 
Not even all the land is fit to be farmed. A good 
part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one's 
work to nature, to fit the crop-scheme to the cli- 
mate and to the soil and the facilities. To live in 
right relation with his natural conditions is one of 
the first lessons that a wise farmer or any other 
wise man learns. We are at pains to stress the im- 
portance of conduct; very well: conduct toward the 
earth is an essential part of it. 

Nor need we be afraid of any fact that makes one 
fact more or less in the sum of contacts between the 
earth and the earth-born children. All "higher crit- 
icism " adds to the faith rather than subtracts from 

11 



The Holy Earth 

it, and strengthens the bond between. The earth 
and its products are very real. 

Our outlook has been drawn very largely from the 
abstract. Not being yet prepared to understand the 
conditions of nature, man considered the earth to 
be inhospitable, and he looked to the supernatural 
for relief; and relief was heaven. Our pictures of 
heaven are of the opposites of daily experience, — of 
release, of peace, of joy uninterrupted. The hunt- 
ing-grounds are happy and the satisfaction has no 
end. The habit of thought has been set by this con- 
ception, and it colors our dealings with the human 
questions and to much extent it controls our prac- 
tice. 

But we begin to understand that the best dealing 
with problems on earth is to found it on the facts of 
earth. This is the contribution of natural science, 
however abstract, to human welfare. Heaven is to 
be a real consequence of life on earth; and we do 
not lessen the hope of heaven by increasing our affec- 
tion for the earth, but rather do we strengthen it. 
Men now forget the old images of heaven, that they 
are mere sojourners and wanderers lingering for de- 
liverance, pilgrims in a strange land. Waiting for 
this rescue, with posture and formula and phrase, 
we have overlooked the essential goodness and 
quickness of the earth and the immanence of God. 

This feeling that we are pilgrims in a vale of tears 
12 



It is Kindly 

has been enhanced by the wide-spread belief in the 
sudden ending of the world, by collision or some 
other impending disaster, and in the common appre- 
hension of doom; and lately by speculations as to 
the aridation and death of the planet, to which all 
of us have given more or less credence. But most 
of these notions are now considered to be fantastic, 
and we are increasingly confident that the earth is 
not growing old in a human sense, that its atmosphere 
and its water are held by the attraction of its mass, 
and that the sphere is at all events so permanent 
as to make little difference in our philosophy and 
no difference in our good behavior. 

I am again impressed with the first record in 
Genesis in which some mighty prophet-poet began 
his account with the creation of the physical uni- 
verse. 

So do we forget the old-time importance given to 
mere personal salvation, which was permission to 
live in heaven, and we think more of our present 
situation, which is the situation of obligation and 
of service; and he who loses his life shall save it. 

We begin to foresee the vast religion of a better 
social order. 



13 



The earth is holy 

Verily, then, the earth is divine, because man did 
not make it. We are here, part in the creation. We 
cannot escape. We are under obligation to take 
part and to do our best, living with each other and 
with all the creatures. We may not know the full 
plan, but that does not alter the relation. When 
once we set ourselves to the pleasure of our domin- 
ion, reverently and hopefully, and assume all its re- 
sponsibilities, we shall have a new hold on life. 

We shall put our dominion into the realm of 
morals. It is now in the realm of trade. This will 
be very personal morals, but it will also be national 
and racial morals. More iniquity follows the im- 
proper and greedy division of the resources and 
privileges of the earth than any other form of sin- 
fulness. 

If God created the earth, so is the earth hal- 
lowed; and if it is hallowed, so must we deal with 
it devotedly and with care that we do not despoil 
it, and mindful of our relations to all beings that 
live on it. We are to consider it religiously: Put 
off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon 
thou standest is holy ground. 

14 



The Earth is Holy 

The sacredness to us of the earth is intrinsic and 
inherent. It Hes in our necessary relationship and 
in the duty imposed upon us to have dominion, and 
to exercise ourselves even against our own interests. 
We may not waste that which is not ours. To live 
in sincere relations with the company of created 
things and with conscious regard for the support 
of all men now and yet to come, must be of the 
essence of righteousness. 

This is a larger and more original relation than 
the modern attitude of appreciation and admiration 
of nature. In the days of the patriarchs and proph- 
ets, nature and man shared in the condemnation 
and likewise in the redemption. The ground was 
cursed for Adam^s sin. Paul wrote that the whole 
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, and that 
it waiteth for the revealing. Isaiah proclaimed the 
redemption of the wilderness and the solitary place 
with the redemption of man, when they shall re- 
joice and blossom as the rose, and when the glowing 
sand shall become a pool and the thirsty ground 
springs of water. 

The usual objects have their moral significance. 
An oak-tree is to us a moral object because it lives its 
life regularly and fulfils its destiny. In the wind 
and in the stars, in forest and by the shore, there is 
spiritual refreshment: And the spirit of God moved 
upon the face of the waters. 

15 



The Holy Earth 

I do not mean all this, for our modern world, in 
any vague or abstract way. If the earth is holy, 
then the things that grow out of the earth are also 
holy. They do not belong to man to do with them 
as he will. Dominion does not carry personal own- 
ership. There are many generations of folk yet to 
come after us, who will have equal right with us to 
the products of the globe. It would seem that a 
divine obligation rests on every soul. Are we to 
make righteous use of the vast accumulation of 
knowledge of the planet? If so, we must have a 
new formulation. The partition of the earth among 
the millions who live on it is necessarily a question 
of morals; and a society that is founded on an 
unmoral partition and use cannot itself be righteous 
and whole. 



16 



Second, the Consequences 

I HAVE now stated my purpose; and the remainder 
of the little book will make some simple applications 
of it and draw some inferences therefrom. There is 
nothing here that need alarm the timid, albeit we 
enter a disputed field, a field of opinion rather than 
of demonstration; and if the reader goes with me, 
I trust that we may have a pleasant journey. 

It is to be a journey of recognition, not of pro- 
test. It is needful that we do not forget. 

We are not to enter into a course of reasoning 
with those whom we meet on the way, or to pause 
to debate the definitions and analyses made in 
books, or to deny any of the satisfactions of tradi- 
tion. We shall be ready for impressions; and pos- 
sibly we shall be able to find some of the old truths 
in unfrequented places. 



17 



The habit of destruction 

The first observation that must be apparent to 
all men is that om* dominion has been mostly de- 
structive. 

We have been greatly engaged in digging up the 
stored resources, and in destroying vast products of 
the earth for some small kernel that we can apply 
to our necessities or add to our enjoyments. We 
excavate the best of the coal and cast away the re- 
mainder; blast the minerals and metals from under- 
neath the crust, and leave the earth raw and sore; 
we box the pines for turpentine and abandon the 
growths of limitless years to fire and devastation; 
sweep the forests with the besom of destruction; 
pull the fish from the rivers and ponds without 
making any adequate provision for renewal ; extermi- 
nate whole races of animals; choke the streams with 
refuse and dross; rob the land of its available stores, 
denuding the surface, exposing great areas to erosion. 

Nor do we exercise the care and thrift of good 
housekeepers. We do not clean up our work or 
leave the earth in order. The remnants and ac- 
cumulation of mining-camps are left to ruin and 
decay; the deserted phosphate excavations are 
ragged, barren, and unfilled; vast areas of forested 

18 



The Habit of Destruction 

lands are left in brush and waste, unthoughtful of 
the future, unmindful of the years that must be 
consumed to reduce the refuse to mould and to 
cover the surface respectably, uncharitable to those 
who must clear away the wastes and put the place 
in order; and so thoughtless are we with these 
natural resources that even the establishments that 
manufacture them — the mills, the factories of many 
kinds — are likely to be offensive objects in the 
landscape, imclean, unkempt, displaying the uncon- 
cern of the owners to the obligation that the use of 
the materials imposes and to the sensibilities of the 
community for the way in which they handle them. 
The burden of proof seems always to have been 
rested on those who partake little in the benefits, 
although we know that these non-partakers have 
been real owners of the resources; and yet so unde- 
veloped has been the public conscience in these 
matters that the blame — if blame there be — can- 
not be laid on one group more than on the other. 
Strange it is, however, that we should not have 
insisted at least that those who appropriate the ac- 
cumulations of the earth should complete their 
work, cleaning up the remainders, leaving the areas 
wholesome, inoffensive, and safe. How many and 
many are the years required to grow a forest and 
to fill the pockets of the rocks, and how satisfying 
are the landscapes, and yet how desperately soon 

10 



The Holy Earth 

may men reduce it all to ruin and to emptiness, 
and how slatternly may they violate the scenery ! 

All this habit of destructiveness is uneconomic in 
the best sense, unsocial, unmoral. 

Society now begins to demand a constructive pro- 
cess. With care and with regard for other men, we 
must produce the food and the other supplies in 
regularity and sufficiency; and we must clean up 
after our work, that the earth may not be depleted, 
scarred, or repulsive. 

Yet there is even a more defenseless devastation 
than all this. It is the organized destructiveness 
of those who would make military domination the 
major premise in the constitution of society, accom- 
panying desolation with viciousness and violence, 
ravaging the holy earth, disrespecting the works of 
the creator, looking toward extirpation, confessing 
thereby that they do not know how to live in co- 
operation with their fellows; in such situations, every 
new implement of destruction adds to the guilt. 

In times past we were moved by religious fanati- 
cism, even to the point of waging wars. To-day we 
are moved by impulses of trade, and we find our- 
selves plunged into a war of commercial frenzy; and 
as it has behind it vaster resources and more com- 
mand of natural forces, so is it the most ferocious 
and wasteful that the race has experienced, exceed- 
ing in its havoc the cataclysms of earthquake and 

20 



The Habit of Destruction 

volcano. Certainly we have not yet learned how 
to withstand the prosperity and the privileges that 
we have gained by the discoveries of science; and 
certainly the morals of commerce has not given us 
freedom or mastery. Rivalry that leads to arms is 
a natural fruit of unrestrained rivalry in trade. 

Man has dominion, but he has no commission to 
devastate: And the Lord God took the man, and put 
him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 

Verily, so bountiful hath been the earth and so 
securely have we drawn from it our substance, that 
we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a 
gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the 
consequences of our use of it. 



21 



The new hold 

We may distinguish three stages in our relation to 
the planet, — the collecting stage, the mining stage, 
and the producing stage. These overlap and per- 
haps are nowhere distinct, and yet it serves a pur- 
pose to contrast them. 

At first man sweeps the earth to see what he may 
gather, — game, wood, fruits, fish, fur, feathers, shells 
on the shore. A certain social and moral life arises 
out of this relation, seen well in the woodsmen and 
the fishers — in whom it best persists to the present 
day — strong, dogmatic, superstitious folk. Then 
man begins to go beneath the surface to see what he 
can find, — iron and precious stones, the gold of 
Ophir, coal, and many curious treasures. This de- 
velops the exploiting faculties, and leads men into 
the uttermost parts. In both these stages the ele- 
ments of waste and disregard have been heavy. 

Finally, we begin to enter the productive stage, 
whereby we secure supplies by controlling the con- 
ditions under which they grow, wasting little, harm- 
ing not. Farming has been very much a mining 
process, the utilizing of fertility easily at hand and 

22 



The New Hold 

the moving-on to lands unspoiled of quick potash 
and nitrogen. Now it begins to be really produc- 
tive and constructive, with a range of responsible 
and permanent morals. We rear the domestic 
animals with precision. We raise crops, when we 
will, almost to a nicety. We plant fish in lakes and 
streams to some extent but chiefly to provide more 
game rather than more human food, for in this range 
we are yet mostly in the collecting or hunter stage. 
If the older stages were strongly expressed in the 
character of the people, so will this new stage be 
expressed; and so is it that we are escaping the 
primitive and should be coming into a new char- 
acter. We shall find our rootage in the soil. 

This new character, this clearer sense of relation- 
ship with the earth, should express itself in all the 
people and not exclusively in farming people and 
their like. It should be a popular character — or a 
national character if we would limit the discussion 
to one people — and not a class character. Now, 
here lies a difiiculty and here is a reason for writing 
this book: the population of the earth is increasing, 
the relative population of farmers is decreasing, 
people are herding in cities, we have a city mind, 
and relatively fewer people are brought into touch 
with the earth in any real way. So is it incumbent 
on us to take special pains — now that we see the new 
time — that all the people, or as many of them as 

23 



The Holy Earth 

possible, shall have contact with the earth and that 
the earth righteousness shall be abundantly taught. 

I hasten to say that I am not thinking of any 
back-to-the-farm movement to bring about the 
results we seek. Necessarily, the proportion of 
farmers will decrease. Not so many are needed, 
relatively, to produce the requisite supplies from the 
earth. Agriculture makes a great contribution to 
human progress by releasing men for the manu- 
factures and the trades. In proportion as the ratio 
of farmers decreases is it important that we provide 
them the best of opportunities and encouragement: 
they must be better and better men. And if we 
are to secure our moral connection with the planet 
to a large extent through them, we can see that 
they bear a relation to society in general that we 
have overlooked. 

Even the farming itself is changing radically in 
character. It ceases to be an occupation to gain 
sustenance and becomes a business. We apply to 
it the general attitudes of commerce. We must be 
alert to see that it does not lose its capacity for 
spiritual contact. 

How we may achieve a more wide-spread contact 
with the earth on the part of all the people with- 
out making them farmers, I shall endeavor to sug- 
gest as I proceed; in fact, this is my theme. Do- 
minion means mastery; we may make the surface 

24 



The New Hold 

of the earth much what we will; w^e can govern the 
way in which we shall contemplate it. We are 
probably near something like a stable occupancy. 
It is not to be expected that there will be vast shift- 
ing of cities as the contest for the mastery of the 
earth proceeds, — probably nothing like the loss of 
Tyre and Carthage, and of the commercial glory of 
Venice. In fact, we shall have a progressive occu- 
pancy. The greater the population, the greater will 
be the demands on the planet; and, moreover, 
every new man will make more demands than his 
father made, for he will want more to satisfy him. 
We are to take from the earth much more than we 
have ever taken before, but it will be taken in a 
new way and with better intentions. It will be seen, 
therefore, that we are not here dealing narrowly 
with an occupation but with something very fun- 
damental to our life on the planet. 

We are not to look for our permanent civilization 
to rest on any species of robber-economy. No 
flurry of coal-mining, or gold-fever, or rubber-col- 
lecting in the tropics, or excitement of prospecting 
for new finds or even locating new lands, no ravish- 
ing of the earth or monopolistic control of its boun- 
ties, will build a stable society. So is much of our 
economic and social fabric transitory. It is not by 
accident that a very distinct form of society is de- 
veloping in the great farming regions of the Missis- 

25 



The Holy Earth 

sippi Valley and in other comparable places; the 
exploiting and promoting occupancy of those lands 
is passing and a stable progressive development 
appears. We have been obsessed of the passion to 
cover everything at once, to skin the earth, to pass 
on, even when there was no necessity for so doing. 
It is a vast pity that this should ever have been the 
policy of government in giving away great tracts 
of land by lottery, as if our fingers would burn if 
we held the lands inviolate until needed by the 
natural process of settlement. The people should 
be kept on their lands long enough to learn how to 
use them. But very well: we have run with the 
wind, we have staked the lands; now we shall be 
real farmers and real conquerors. Not all lands 
are equally good for farming, and some lands will 
never be good for farming; but whether in Iowa, or 
New England, or old Asia, farming land may de- 
velop character in the people. 

My reader must not infer that we have arrived 
at a permanent agriculture, although we begin now 
to see the importance of a permanent land occu- 
pancy. Probably we have not yet evolved a satis- 
fying husbandry that will maintain itself century by 
century, without loss and without the ransacking 
of the ends of the earth for fertilizer materials to 
make good our deficiencies. All the more is it im- 
portant that the problem be elevated into the realm 

26 



The New Hold 

of statesmanship and of morals. Neither must he 
infer that the resources of the earth are to be locked 
up beyond contact and use (for the contact and use 
will be morally regulated). But no system of bril- 
liant exploitation, and no accidental scratching of 
the surface of the earth, and no easy appropriation 
of stored materials can suffice us in the good days 
to come. City, country, this class and that class, 
all fall and merge before the common necessity. 

It is often said that the farmer is our financial 
mainstay; so in the good process of time will he be 
a moral mainstay, for ultimately finance and social 
morals must coincide. 

The gifts are to be used for service and for 
satisfaction, and not for wealth. Very great wealth 
introduces too many intermediaries, too great in- 
directness, too much that is extrinsic, too frequent 
hindrances and superficialities. It builds a wall 
about the man, and too often does he receive his 
impressions of the needs of the world from satellites 
and sycophants. It is significant that great wealth, 
if it contributes much to social service, usually ac- 
complishes the result by endowing others to work. 
The gift of the products of the earth was "for meat'': 
nothing was said about riches. 

Yet the very appropriation or use of natural re- 
sources may be the means of directing the mind of 
the people back to the native situations. We have 

27 



The Holy Earth 

the opportunity to make the forthcoming develop- 
ment of water-power, for example, such an agency 
for wholesome training. Whenever we can appro- 
priate without despoliation or loss, or without a 
damaging monopoly, we tie the people to the back- 
grounds. 

In the background is the countryman; and how 
is the countryman to make use of the rain and the 
abounding soil, and the varied wonder of plant and 
animal amidst which he lives, that he may arrive at 
kinship? We are teaching him how to bring some 
of these things under the dominion of his hands, how 
to measure and to weigh and to judge. This will 
give him the essential physical mastery. But be- 
yond this, how shall he take them into himself, how 
shall he make them to be of his spirit, how shall he 
complete his dominion ? How shall he become the 
man that his natural position requires of him ? This 
will come slowly, ah, yes ! — slowly. The people — 
the great striving self-absorbed throng of the peo- 
ple — they do not know what we mean when we 
talk like this, they hear only so many fine words. 
The naturist knows that the time will come slowly, 
— not yet are we ready for fulfilment; he knows 
that we cannot regulate the cosmos, or even the 
natural history of the people, by enactments. 
Slowly: by removing handicaps here and there; 
by selection of the folk in a natural process, to elim- 

28 



The New Hold 

inate the unresponsive; by teaching, by suggestion; 
by a pubUc recognition of the problem, even though 
not one of us sees the end of it. 

I hope my reader now sees where I am leading 
him. He sees that I am not thinking merely of 
instructing the young in the names and habits of 
birds and flowers and other pleasant knowledge, al- 
though this worlds strongly toward the desired end; 
nor of any movement merely to have gardens, or 
to own farms, although this is desirable provided 
one is qualified to own a farm; nor of rhapsodies on 
the beauties of nature. Nor am I thinking of any 
new plan or any novel kind of institution or any 
new agency; rather shall we do better to escape 
some of the excessive institutionalism and organiza- 
tion. We are so accustomed to think in terms of 
organized politics and education and religion and 
philanthropies that when we detach ourselves we 
are said to lack definiteness. It is the personal satis- 
faction in the earth to which we are born, and the 
quickened responsibility, the whole relation, broadly 
developed, of the man and of all men,— it is this 
attitude that we are to discuss. 

The years pass and they grow into centuries. 
We see more clearly. We are to take a new hold. 



29 



The hroiherJwod relation 

A constructive and careful handling of the re- 
sources of the earth is impossible except on a basis 
of large co-operation and of association for mutual 
welfare. The great inventions and discoveries of 
recent time have extensive social significance. 

Yet we have other relations than with the physical 
and static materials. We are parts in a living sen- 
sitive creation. The theme of evolution has over- 
turned our attitude toward this creation. The living 
creation is not exclusively man-centred: it is bio- 
centric. We perceive the essential continuity in 
nature, arising from within rather than from with- 
out, the forms of life proceeding upwardly and on- 
wardly in something very like a mighty plan of 
sequence, man being one part in the process. We 
have genetic relation with all living things, and our 
aristocracy is the aristocracy of nature. We can 
claim no gross superiority and no isolated self- 
importance. The creation, and not man, is the 
norm. Even now do we begin to guide our prac- 
tises and our speech by our studies of what we still 
call the lower creation. We gain a good perspective 
on ourselves. 

30 



The Brotherhood Relation 

If we are parts in the evolution, and if the uni- 
verse, or even the earth, is not made merely as a 
footstool, or as a theatre for man, so do we lose 
our cosmic selfishness and we find our place in the 
plan of things. We are emancipated from igno- 
rance and superstition and small philosophies. The 
present wide-spread growth of the feeling of brother- 
hood would have been impossible in a self-centred 
creation: the way has been prepared by the discus- 
sion of evolution, which is the major biological con- 
tribution to human welfare and progress. This is 
the philosophy of the oneness in nature and the 
unity in living things. 



3i 



The farmer^ s f elation 

The surface of the earth is particularly within 
the care of the farmer. He keeps it for his own 
sustenance and gain, but his gain is also the gain 
of all the rest of us. At the best, he accumulates 
little to himself. The successful farmer is the one 
who produces more than he needs for his support; 
and the overplus he does not keep; and, moreover, 
his own needs are easily satisfied. It is of the utmost 
consequence that the man next the earth shall lead 
a fair and simple life; for in riotous living he might 
halt many good supplies that now go to his fellows. 

It is a public duty so to train the farmer that he 
shall appreciate his guardianship. He is engaged 
in a quasi-public business. He really does not 
even own his land. He does not take his land 
with him, but only the personal development that 
he gains from it. He cannot annihilate his land, as 
another might destroy all his belongings. He is the 
agent or the representative of society to guard and 
to subdue the surface of the earth; and he is the 
agent of the divinity that made it. He must exer- 
cise his dominion with due regard to all these obli- 
gations. He is a trustee. The productiveness of 

32 



The Farmer's Relation 

the earth must increase from generation to genera- 
tion: this also is his obHgation. He must handle 
all his materials, remembering man and remember- 
ing God. A man cannot be a good farmer unless 
he is a religious man. 

If the farmer is engaged in a quasi-public busi- 
ness, shall we undertake to regulate him ? This re- 
lationship carries a vast significance to the social 
order, and it must color our attitude toward the 
man on the land. We are now in that epoch of 
social development when we desire to regulate by 
law everything that is regulatable and the other 
things besides. It is recently proposed that the 
Congress shall pass a law regulating the cropping 
scheme of the farmer for the protection of soil fer- 
tility. This follows the precedent of the regulation, 
by enactment, of trusts and public utilities. It is 
fortunate that such a law cannot be passed, and 
could not be enforced if it were passed ; but this and 
related proposals are crude expressions of the grow- 
ing feeling that the farmer owes an obligation to 
society, and that this obligation must be enforced 
and the tiller of the soil be held to account. 

We shall produce a much better and safer man 
when we make him self-controlling by developing 
his sense of responsibility than when we regulate 
him by exterior enactments. 

In the realm of control of the farming occupation 
33 



The Holy Earth 

we shall invoke other than legal means, and perhaps 
these means will be suggestive for other situations. 
These means may be somewhat indefinite in the 
law-book sense, but they may attain to a better 
human result. We shall reach the question by 
surer ways than the crudities of legislation. We 
shall reach the man, in this field, rather than his 
business. We have begun it by accepting it as one 
part of our duty to the race to provide liberally at 
public expense for the special education of the man 
on the land. This is the reason, even if we have 
not formulated it to ourselves, why society is willing 
to go farther in the education of the farming peo- 
ple than in the popular education of other ranges 
of the people. This, of course, is the fundamental 
way; and if there are any governments that at- 
tempt to safeguard this range directly by laws 
rather than by education, then they have not ar- 
rived at a long view of the situation. 

We invoke regulatory law for the control of the 
corporate activities; but we must not forget the 
other kinds of activities contributing to the making 
of society, nor attempt to apply to them the same 
methods of correction. 

Into this secular and more or less technical educa- 
tion we are now to introduce the element of moral 
obligation, that the man may understand his peculiar 
contribution and responsibility to society; but this 

34 



The Farmer^s Relation 

result cannot be attained until the farmer and every 
one of us recognize the hohness of the earth. 

The farmer and every one of us: every citizen 
should be put right toward the planet, should be 
quicked to his relationship to his natural back- 
ground. The whole body of public sentiment should 
be sympathetic with the man who works and ad- 
ministers the land for us; and this requires under-, 
standing. We have heard much about the "mar- 
ginal man," but the first concern of society should 
be for the bottom man. 

If this philosophy should really be translated into 
action, the farmer would nowhere be a peasant, 
forming merely a caste, and that a low one, among 
his fellows. He would be an independent co-op- 
erating citizen partaking fully of the fruits of his 
labor, enjoying the social rewards of his essential 
position, being sustained and protected by a body 
of responsive public opinion. The farmer cannot 
keep the earth for us without an enlightened and 
very active support from every other person, and 
without adequate safeguards from exploitation and 
from unessential commercial pressure. 

This social support requires a ready response on 
the part of the farmer; and he must also be devel- 
oped into his position by a kind of training that will 
make him quickly and naturally responsive to it. 
The social fascination of the town will always be 

35 



The Holy Earth 

greater than that of the open country. The move- 
ments are more rapid, more picturesque, have more 
color and more vivacity. It is not to be expected 
that we can overcome this fascination and safe- 
guard the country boy and girl merely by intro- 
ducing more showy or active enterprises into the 
open country. We must develop a new background 
for the country youth, establish new standards, and 
arouse a new point of view. The farmer will not 
need all the things that the city man thinks the 
farmer needs. We must stimulate his moral re- 
sponse, his appreciation of the worthiness of the 
things in which he lives, and increase his knowledge 
of all the objects and affairs amongst which he 
moves. The backbone of the rural question is at 
the bottom a moral problem. 

We do not yet know whether the race can perma- 
nently endure urban life, or whether it must be 
constantly renewed from the vitalities in the rear. 
We know that the farms and the back spaces have 
been the mother of the race. We know that the 
exigencies and frugalities of life in these backgrounds 
beget men and women to be serious and steady and 
to know the value of every hour and of every coin 
that they earn; and whenever they are properly 
trained, these folk recognize the holiness of the earth. 

For some years I have had the satisfaction to 
speak to rural folk in many places on the holy earth 
and to make some of the necessary applications. 

3a 



The Farmer^s Relation 

Everywhere I have met the heartiest assent from 
these people. Specially do they respond to the sug- 
gestion that if the earth is hallowed, so are the na- 
tive products of the earth hallowed; and they like 
to have the mystery — which is the essential senti- 
ment — of these things brought home to them with 
frequency. I will here let my reader have a letter 
that one of these persons wrote me, and I print it 
without change. On inquiry, the writer of it told 
me that he is a farmer, has never followed any other 
occupation, was brought up "in the woods,'' and 
has had practically no education. I did not ask 
him, but I judge from the narrative style that he 
has been a reader or a hearer of the Old Testament; 
and here is the letter: 

As you say, too many people confound farming, with 
that sordid, selfish, money-getting game, called "business," 
whereas, the farmer's position is administrative, being in a 
way a dispenser of the " Mysteries of God," for they are mys- 
teries. Every apple is a mystery, and every potato is a 
mystery, and every ear of corn is a mystery, and every pound 
of butter is a mystery, and when a " farmer " is not able to 
understand these things he is out of place. 

The farmer uses the soil and the rains and the snows and 
the frosts and the winds and the sun; these are also the im- 
plements of the Almighty, the only tools He uses, and while 
you were talking that day, it brought to mind the recollec- 
tion of an account I once read of an occurrence which took 
place in the vicinity of Carlsruhe, in Germany, about thirty 
years ago, and I want to tell you about it. An old man and 

37 



The Holy Earth 

his two sons, who were laborers on a large farm there, went 
out one morning to mow peas, with scythes, as was the method 
in use at that time, and soon after they began work, they 
noticed a large active man coming along a pathway which 
bordered the field on one side, and w.hen he came to where 
they were, he spoke to them, very pleasantly, and asked them 
some questions about their work and taking the scythe from 
the hands of the older man he mowed some w4th it and finally 
returned it and went his way. After a time when the owner 
of the farm came out to oversee the work they told him of the 
occurrence, and asked him if he could tell who the stranger 
might be, and he told them that he was Prince Bismarck, 
the Chancellor of the empire, who was staying at his country 
home at Carlsruhe, and was out for his morning walk, and 
they were astonished, and the old man was filled with a great 
pride, and he felt himself elevated above all his fellows, and 
he wouldn't have sold his scythe for half the money in Ger- 
many, and his descendants to this day boast of the fact that 
their father and Bismarck mowed with the same scythe. 
Now if it was sufficient to stimulate the pride of this old 
laborer, if it was sufficient to create for him a private aris- 
tocracy, if it was sufficient to convert that old rusty scythe 
into a priceless heirloom to be treasured up and transmitted 
from father to son, if it was sufficient for all these things 
that he had once held a momentarily unimportant associa- 
tion with the man of "blood and iron," how much more incon- 
ceivably and immeasurably high and exalted is the station 
of the farmer who is, in a measure, a fellow craftsman of the 
God of Nature, of the great First Cause of all things, and 
people don't know it. No wonder the boys leave the farm 1 

38 



The underlying training of a peopli 

This, then, is the landsman's obligation, and his 
joyful privilege. But it must not be supposed that 
he alone bears the responsibility to maintain the 
holiness of the divine earth. It is the obligation 
also of all of us, since every one is born to the earth 
and lives upon it, and since every one must react to 
it to the extent of his place and capabilities. This 
being so, then it is a primary need that we shall 
place at the use of the people a kind of education 
that shall quicken these attachments. 

Certainly all means of education are useful, and 
every means should be developed to its best; and 
it is not to be expected that all the people shall pur- 
sue a single means: but to the nation and to the 
race a fundamental training must be provided. 

We are now in the time of developing a technical 
education in agriculture, to the end that we may 
produce our land supplies. Already this education 
is assuming broad aspects, and we begin to see that 
it has very important bearing on public policies. 
It is a new form of exercise in natural science, — the 
old education in this great realm having become so 

30 



The Holy Earth 

specialized and departmentalized as to lose much of 
its value as a means of popular training. 

It is a happy augury that in North America so 
many public men and administrators have taken 
the large view of education by means of agriculture, 
desiring, while training farmers of those who would 
be farmers, to make it a means of bringing the un- 
derstanding of the people back to the land. The 
Americans are making a very remarkable contribu- 
tion here, in a spirit of real statesmanship. In the 
long run, this procedure will produce a spirit in the 
people that will have far-reaching importance in the 
development of national character, and in a relation 
to the backgrounds of which very few of us yet have 
vision. 

It will be fortunate if we can escape the formal- 
izing and professionalizing of this education, that 
has cast such a blight on most of the older means 
of training the young, and if we can keep it demo- 
cratic and free in spirit. 

We shall need to do the same in all the subjects 
that lie at the foundations, — in all the other crafts; 
all these crafts are of the earth. They support the 
physical man and the social fabric, and make the 
conditions out of which all the highest achieve- 
ments may come. 

Every person in a democracy has a right to be 
educated by these means; and a people living in a 

40 



The Underlying Training of a People 

democracy must of necessity understand the sig- 
nificance of such education. This education should 
result or function politically. It is not sufficient to 
train technically in the trades and crafts and arts 
to the end of securing greater economic efficiency, — 
this may be accomplished in a despotism and re- 
sult in no self-action on the part of the people. 
Every democracy must reach far beyond what is 
commonly known as economic efficiency, and do 
everything it can to enable those in the backgrounds 
to maintain their standing and their pride and to 
partake in the making of political affairs. 



41 



The neighbor*3 access to the earth 

When one really feels the response to the native 
earth, one feels also the obligation and the impulse 
to share it with the neighbor. 

The earth is not selfish. It is open and free to 
all. It invites everywhere. The naturist is not 
selfish, — ^he shares all his joys and discoveries, even 
to the extent of publishing them. The farmer is 
not selfish with his occupation, — he freely aids every 
one or any one to engage in his occupation, even if 
that one becomes his competitor. But occupations 
that are some degrees removed from the earth may 
display selfishness; trade and, to a large extent, 
manufacture are selfish, and they lock themselves 
in. Even the exploiting of the resources of the earth 
may be selfish, in the taking of the timber and the 
coal, the water-powers and the minerals, for all this 
is likely to develop to a species of plunder. The 
naturist desires to protect the plants and the animals 
and the situations for those less fortunate and for 
those who come after. There are lumbermen and 
miners with the finest sense of obligation. There 
are other men who would take the last nugget and 
destroy the last bole. 

42 



The Neishbor^s Access to the Earth 



'to 



We are to recognize the essential integrity of the 
farming occupation, when developed constructively, 
as contrasted with the vast system of improbity and 
dishonor that arises from depredation and from the 
taking of booty. 

The best kind of community interest attaches to 
the proper use and partitioning of the earth, a com- 
munism that is dissociated from propaganda and 
programs. The freedom of the earth is not the 
freedom of license: there is always the thought of 
the others that are dependent on it. It is the free- 
dom of utilization for needs and natural desires, 
without regard to one*s place among one's fellows, 
or even to one's condition of degradation or state 
of sinfulness. All men are the same when they 
come back to the meadows, to the hills, and to the 
deep woods: He maketh his sun to rise on the evil 
and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the 
unjust. 

The lesson of the growing abounding earth is of 
liberality for all, and never exploitation or very ex- 
clusive opportunities for the few. Even if the weaker 
an;y^here perish in the contest for food, they are 
nevertheless given the opportunity to contest on 
terms equal to their abilities; and at all events, 
we come, in the human sphere, to the domination 
of sweet reason rather than to competition in sheer 
force. When, by means of reasonable education, 

43 



The Holy Earth 

this simple relation is understood by mankind and 
begins to express itself spontaneously, we shall find 
our voluminous complex of laws to regulate selfish- 
ness gradually disappearing and passing into the 
limbo. 

It is now easy to understand the sinfulness of vast 
private estates that shut up expanses of the sur- 
face of the earth from the reach and enjoyment of 
others that are born similarly to the privileges of 
the planet. There is no warrant in nature for 
guarantee deeds to such estates. It is true, of 
course, that land-estates should not be equal, for 
capacities for use are not equal, and abilities and 
deserts are not equal. It is legitimate to reward 
those who otherwise render great service, and this 
rew^ard may lie in unusual privileges. The present 
emoluments in the way of incomes bear little re- 
lation to service or even to merit. 

We have not yet escaped the idea that vested 
rights — and particularly personal realty — are in- 
violable. Certainly these rights must be protected 
by law, otherwise there can be no stability and regu- 
larity in affairs; but there is no inalienable right in 
the ownership of the surface of the earth. Readjust- 
ments must come, and even now they are coming 
slowly, and here and there in the interest of the 
neighbor; and in the end there will be no private 
monopoly of public or natural resources. 

44 



The Neighbor's Access to the Earth 

The cure for these ills does not lie, however, in 
the ownership of all the land by "the government," 
at least not in our time and perhaps never. It is 
well for a person to have his own plot for his life- 
time, with the right to use it as he will so long as 
he does not offend, or does not despoil it for those 
who follow: it steadies him, and it identifies him 
with a definite program in life. 

We usually speak as if all good results in the dis- 
tribution of the natural bounty will ensue if "the 
government" or "the state" owns the resources; 
but government ownership of resources and direction 
of industries may not mean freedom or escape for 
the people. It depends entirely on the kind of 
government, — not on its name or description, but 
on the extent to which the people have been trained 
to partake on their own initiative. The govern- 
ment may be an autocracy or only another form of 
monopoly. 

The aristocracy of land has much to its credit. 
Great gains in human accomplishment have come 
out of it; but this does not justify it for the future. 
The aristocracy of land is a very dangerous power 
in human affairs. It is all the more dangerous when 
associated with aristocracy of birth and of factitious 
social position, which usually accompany it. A 
people may be ever so free in its advantages and 
in its theoretical political organization, and yet 

45 



The Holy Earth 

suffer overwhelming bondage If its land is tied up 
in an aristocratic system, and particularly if that 
system is connected into a social aristocracy. And 
whenever rigid aristocracy in land connects itself 
with the close control of polities', the subjection be- 
comes final and complete. 

What lies within a nation or a people may lie in 
enlarged form between the nations or the peoples. 
Neighborliness is international. Contest for land 
and sea is at the basis of wars. Recognizing the 
right of any people to its own life, we must equally 
recognize its right to a sufficient part of the surface 
of the earth. We must learn how to subdivide it 
on the basis of neighborliness, friendship, and con- 
ference; If we cannot learn this, tlien we cannot 
be neighbors but only enemies. The proposal now 
before Congress to cede to Canada the Alaskan 
Panhandle, or a part of it, is an evidence of this 
growth of international morals, extended to the 
very basis on which nations have been the least 
ready to co-operate. 

If we may fraternalize territory, so shall we fra- 
ternalize commerce. No people may rightly be 
denied the privilege to trade with all other peoples. 
All kinds of useful interchange are civlllzers and 
peacemakers; and If we carry ourselves to others 
when we carry our produce and our wares, so do 
any of us need that others shall bring their produce 

46 



The Neighbor's Access to the Earth 



'to 



and their wares to us. It would be a sorry people 
that purchased no supplies from without. Every 
people, small or large, has right of access to the 
sea, for the sea belongs to mankind. It folIow3 
that no people has a right to deprive any other 
people of the shore, if that people desires the con- 
tact. 

We now begin to understand the awful sin of 
partitioning the earth by force. 



47 



The siihdmding of the land 

The question then arises whether lands and other 
natural resources shall now be divided and redis- 
tributed in order that the share-and-share of the 
earth's patrimony shall be morally just. Undoubt- 
edly the logic of the situation makes for many per- 
sonal points of very close contact with the mother 
earth, and contact is usually most definite and best 
when it results from what we understand as owner- 
ship. This, in practice, suggests many small par- 
cels of land — for those who would have tlieir con- 
tact by means of land, which is tlie directest means 
— under personal fee. But due provision must al- 
ways be made, as I have already indicated, for the 
man who makes unusual contribution to the wel- 
fare of his fellows, that he may be allowed to extend 
his service and attain his own full development; and 
moreover, an established order may not be over- 
turned suddenly and completely without much 
damage, not only to personal interests but to so- 
ciety. Every person should have the right and the 
privilege to a personal use of some part of the 
earth; and naturally the extent of his privilege 
must be determined by his use of it. 

4S 



The Subdividing of the Land 

It i3 urged that lands can be most economically 
administered in very hirge units and under cor- 
porate management; but the economic resuUs are 
not the most important results to be secured, al- 
though at present they are the most stressed. The 
ultimate good in the use of land is the development 
of the peoj)le; it may be better that more persons 
have contact with it than that it shall be executively 
more cfTectivcly administered. The morals of land 
management is more important than the economics 
of land management; and of course my reader is 
aware that by morals I mean the results that arise 
from a right use of the earth rather than the formal 
attitudes toward standardized or conventional codes 
of conduct. 

If the moral and the economic ends can be secured 
simultaneously, as eventually they will be secured, 
the perfect results will come to pass; but any line 
of development founded on accountant economics 
alone will fail. 

Here I must pause for an explanation in self- 
defense, for my reader may think I advise the " little 
farm well tilled" that has so much captured the 
public mind. So far from giving such advice, I am 
not thinking exclusively of farming when I speak of 
the partitioning of the land. One may have land 
merely to live on. Another may have a wood to 
wander in. One may have a spot on which to muke 

49 



The Holy Earth 

a garden. Another may have a shore, and another 
a retreat in the mountains or in some far space. 
Much of the earth can never be farmed or mined 
or used for timber, and yet these supposed waste 
places may be very real assets to the race: we shall 
learn this in time. I am glad to see these outlying 
places set aside as public reserves; and yet we must 
not so organize and tie up the far spaces as to pre- 
vent persons of little means from securing small 
parcels. These persons should have land that they 
can handle and manipulate, in which they may dig, 
on which they may plant trees and build cabins, 
and which they may feel is theirs to keep and to 
master, and which they are not obliged to "im- 
prove." In the parks and reserves the land may 
be available only to look at, or as a retreat in which 
one may secure permission to camp. The regula- 
tions are necessary for these places, but these 
places are not sufficient. 

If it were possible for every person to own a tree 
and to care for it, the good results would be beyond 
estimation. 

Now, farming is a means of support; and in this 
case, the economic possibilities of a particular piece 
of land are of primary consequence. Of course, the 
most complete permanent contact with the earth 
is by means of farming, when one makes a living 
from the land; this should produce better results 

50 



The Subdividing of the Land 

than hunting or sport; but one must learn how to 
make this connection. It is possible to hoe potatoes 
and to hear the birds sing at the same time, although 
our teaching has not much developed this complete- 
ness in the minds of the people. 

I hope, therefore, that the farmer's piece of land 
will be economically good (that it may make him 
a living and produce a surplus for some of the rest 
of us), and that the farmer may be responsive to 
his situation. The size of the farm that is to sup- 
port a family, and the kinds of crops that shall be 
grown and even the yields that shall be secured to 
the acre, are technical problems of agriculture. In 
this New World, with expensive labor and still with 
cheap land, we cannot yet afford to produce the high 
yields of some of the Old World places, — it may be 
better to till more land with less yield to the acre. 
But all this is aside from my present purpose; and 
this purpose is to suggest the very real importance 
of making it possible for an increasing proportion 
of the people to have close touch with the earth in 
their own rights and in their own names. 

We recognize different grades or kinds of land 
occupancy, some of it being proprietorship and 
some of it tenancy and some of it mere share- 
holding. Thus far have we spoken of the parti- 
tioning of the land mostly in its large social and 
political relations; but to society also belongs the 

51 



The Holy Earth 

fertility of the land, and all efforts to conserve this 
fertility are public questions in the best sense. In 
America we think of tenant occupancy of land as 
dangerous because it does not safeguard fertility; 
in fact, it may waste fertility.- This is because the 
practice in tenancy does not recognize the public 
interest in fertility, and the contract or agreement is 
made merely between the landowner and the ten- 
ant, and is largely an arrangement for skinning 
the land. It is only when the land itself is a party 
in the contract (when posterity is considered) that 
tenancy is safe. Then the tenant is obliged to fer- 
tilize the land, to practise certain rotations, and 
otherwise to conserve fertility, returning to the land 
the manurial value of products that are sold. When 
such contracts are made and enforced, tenancy 
farming does not deplete the land more than other 
farming, as the experience in some countries dem- 
onstrates. It is hardly to be expected, however, 
that tenant occupancy will give the man as close 
moral contact with the earth and its materials as 
will ownership; yet a well-developed tenancy is 
better than absentee farming by persons who live 
in town and run the farm by temporary hired help. 
The tenancy in the United States is partly a pre- 
liminary stage to ownership: if we can fulfil the 
moral obligation to society in the conserving of 
fertility and other natural resources, tenancy may 
be considered as a means to an end. Persons 

52 



The Subdividing of the Land 

who work the land should have the privilege of 
owning it. 

It may be urged by those who contend that land 
should be held by society, that this regulation of 
tenancy provides a means of administering all farm 
lands by government in the interest of mainte- 
nance of fertility. Leaving aside the primary de- 
sirability, as I see it, of reserving individual initia- 
tive, it is to be said that this kind of regulation of 
the tenant is possible only with a live-stock hus- 
bandry; nor do we yet have sufficient knowledge 
to enable us to project a legal system for all kinds 
of agriculture; nor again is it applicable to widely 
differing conditions and regions. A keener sense 
of responsibility will enable owner and tenant to 
work out better methods in all cases, but it is now 
impossible to incorporate complete control methods 
into successful legislative regulations. The in- 
creasing competition will make it ever more difficult 
for the careless man to make a good living by farm- 
ing, and he will be driven from the business; or if he 
is not driven out, society will take away his privilege. 

Yet we are not to think of society as founded 
wholly on small separate tracts, or "family farms," 
occupied by persons who live merely in content- 
ment; this would mean that all landsmen would be 
essentially laborers. We need to hold on the land 
many persons who possess large powers of organiza- 
tion, who are managers, who can handle affairs in 

53 



The Holy Earth 

a bold way: it would be fatal to the best social and 
spiritual results if such persons could find no ade- 
quate opportunities on the land and were forced 
into other occupations. Undoubtedly we shall find 
ourselves with very unlike land units, encouraged 
and determined by the differing conditions and op- 
portunities in different regions; and thereby shall 
we also avoid the great danger of making our fun- 
damental occupation to produce a uniform and 
narrow class spirit. 

We need the great example of persons who live 
separately on their lands, who desire to abide, who 
are serious in the business, and who have sufficient 
proprietary rights to enable them to handle the nat- 
ural resources responsibly. There is a type of well- 
intentioned writers that would have the farmers 
live in centres in order that they may have what 
are called "social" advantages, betaking themselves 
every morning to the fields when the dew is on the 
grass and the birds sing, hastening back every eve- 
ning (probably when the clock points to five) to en- 
gage in the delightful delirium of card-parties and 
moving-picture shows (of course gathering the 
golden harvest in the meantime). Other writers 
are to have the farms so small that the residences 
will be as close as on a village street, and a trolley- 
car will run through, and I suppose the band will 
play ! 

54 



A new map 

If, then, we are to give the people access to the 
holy earth, it means not only a new assent on the 
part of society but a new way of partitioning the 
surface. This is true whether we consider the sub- 
ject wholly from the view-point of making natural 
resources utilizable or from the added desire to let 
the people out to those resources. 

The organization of any affair or enterprise de- 
termines to a great extent the character of the re- 
sult; and the organization rests directly on the sub- 
division into parts. The dividing of a business into 
separate responsibilities of different departments 
and sub-departments makes for easy access and for 
what we now know as efficiency; the dividing of a 
nation into states or provinces and counties and 
many lesser units makes political life possible; the 
setting off of a man's farm into fields, with lanes 
and roads connecting, makes a working enterprise. 
The more accurately these subdivisions follow nat- 
ural and living necessities, the greater will be the 
values and the satisfactions that result from the 
undertaking. 

Here is the open country, behind the great cities 
55 



The Holy Earth 

and the highly specialized industries. There are 
hills in it, great and small. There are forests here, 
none there; sands that nobody wants; fertile lands 
that everybody wants; shores inviting trade; min- 
eral wealth; healing waters; power in streams; fish 
in ponds and lakes; building stone; swamps abound- 
ing in life; wild corners that stimulate desire; scen- 
eries that take the soul into the far places. These 
are the fundamental reserves and the backgrounds. 
The first responsibility of any society is to protect 
them, husband them, bring them into use, and at 
the same time to teach the people what they mean. 
To bring them into use, and, at the same time, 
to protect them from rapacious citizens who have 
small social conscience, it is necessary to have good 
access. It is necessary to have roads. These roads 
should be laid where the resources exist, direct, 
purposeful. In a flat and uniform country, road 
systems may well be rectangular, following section- 
lines and intermediate lines; but the rectangularity 
is not the essential merit, — it is only a serviceable 
way of subdividing the resources. To find one's 
direction, north or south, is convenient, but it may 
clearly be subordinated to the utilization and pro- 
tection of the supplies. The section-line division 
may accomplish this or it may not, and it is likely 
to place roads in wrong locations and to render the 
country monotonous and uninteresting. 

56 



A New Map 

But in the broken country, in the country of 
tumbled hills and crooked falling streams, of slopes 
that would better be left in the wild, and of lands 
that are good and fruitful for the plow, the roads 
may go the easy grades; but they ought also to go 
in such a plan as to open up the country to the best 
development, to divide its resources in the surest 
way for the greatest number of persons, and to re- 
duce profitless human toil to the minimum,— and 
this is just what they may not do. They may go 
up over bare and barren hills merely to pass a few 
homesteads where no homesteads ought to be, roads 
that are always expensive and never good, that 
accomplish practically nothing for society. They 
leave good little valleys at one side, or enter them 
over almost impossible slopes. There are resources 
of physical wealth and of wonderful scenery that 
they do not touch, that would be of much value if 
they were accessible. The farming country is often 
not divided in such a way as to render it either most 
readily accessible or to make it the most useful as 
an asset for the people. 

To connect villages and cities by stone roads is 
good. But what are we to do with all the back 
country, to make it contribute its needful part to 
feed the people in the days that are to come, and to 
open it to the persons who ought to go? We can- 
not accomplish this to the greatest purpose by the 

57 



The Holy Earth 

present road systems, even if the roads themselves 
are all made good. 

When the traveler goes to a strange country, he 
is interested in the public buildings, the cities, and 
some of the visible externals;- but if he wants to 
understand the country, he must have a detailed 
map of its roads. The automobile maps are of no 
value for this purpose, for they show how one may 
pass over the country, not how the country is de- 
veloped. As the last nerve-fibre and the last capil- 
lary are essential to the end of the finger and to 
the entire body, so the ultimate roads are essential 
to the myriad farms and to the national life. It is 
difiicult in any country to get these maps, accu- 
rately and in detail; but they are the essential guide- 
books. 

We undertake great conquests of engineering, 
over mountains and across rivers and through the 
morasses; but at the last we shall call on the en- 
gineer for the greatest conquest of all, — how to 
divide the surface of the earth so that it shall yield 
us its best and mean to us the most, on the easiest 
grades, in the most practicable way, that we may 
utilize every piece of land to fullest advantage. 

This means a new division and perhaps a redis- 
tribution of lands in such a way that the farmer 
will have his due proportion of hill and of valley, 
rather than that one shall have all valley and an- 

58 



A New Map 

other all hard-scrabble on the hill or all waste land 
in some remote place. It means that there will be 
on each holding the proper relation of tilled land 
and pasture land and forest land, and that the out- 
lets for the farmer and his products will be the readi- 
est and the simplest that it is possible to make. 
It means that some roads will be abandoned en- 
tirely, as not worth the cost, and society will make 
a way for farmers living on impossible farms to 
move to other lands; and that there will be no 
"back roads," for they will be the marks of an un- 
developed society. It means that w^e shall cease 
the pretense to bring all lands into farming, whether 
they are useful for farming or not; and that in the 
back country beyond the last farms there shall be 
trails that lead far away. 

In the farm region itself, much of the old division 
will pass away, being uneconomical and non-social. 
The abandonment of farms is in some cases a be- 
ginning of the process, but it is blind an'd undirected. 
Our educational effort is at present directed toward 
making the farmer prosperous on his existing farm, 
rather than to help him to secure a farm of proper 
resources and with proper access. As time goes on, 
we must reassemble many of the land divisions, if 
each man is to have adequate opportunity to make 
the most effective application of his knowledge, the 
best use of himself, and the greatest possible contri- 

59 



The Holy Earth 

bution to society. It would be well if some of the 
farms could be dispossessed of their owners, so that 
jirojis might be recombincd on a better basis. 

This is no Utopian or socialistic scheme, nor does 
it imply a forcible interference with vested rights. 
It is a plain statement of the necessities of the situa- 
tion. Of course it cannot come about quickly or 
as a result of direct legislation; but there are vari- 
ous movements that may start it, — it is, in fact, 
already started. All the burning rural problems re- 
late themselves in the end to the division of the 
land. In America, we do not suffer from the hold- 
ing of the land in a few families or in an aristocratic 
class; that great danger we have escaped, but we 
have not yet learned how to give the land meaning 
to tlie greatest number of people. This is a question 
for the best i)()litical program, for we look for the day 
when statesmanship shall be expressed in the de- 
tails of common politics. 

We now hear much about the good-roads ques- 
tion, as if it were a problem only of highway con- 
struction: it is really a question of a new map. 



60 



The public program 

It would be a great gain if many persons could 
look forward to the ownership of a hit of tlie earth, 
to share in the partition, to partake in the brother- 
hood. Some day we shall make it easy rather than 
diffieult for this to be brought about. 

Society, in its collective interest, also has neces- 
sities in the land. There is necessity of land to be 
owned by cities and other assemblages for water 
reservoirs, and all the rights thereto; for school 
grounds, ])laygrounds, reformatory institutions, 
hospitals, drill grounds, sewage-disposal areas, irri- 
gation developments, drainage reclamations; for 
the public control of banks and borders of streams 
and ponds, for the shores of all vast bodies of water, 
for pleasure parks, recreation, breathing spaces in 
the great congestions, highways and other lines of 
communication; for the sites of public buildings, 
colleges and experiment stations, bird and beast 
refuges, fish and game reservations, cemeteries. 
There are also the rights of many semi-public 
agencies that need land, — of churches, of fraternal 
organizations, of incorporated seminaries and schools, 
of water-power and oil and coal developments, of 

Gl 



The Holy Earth 

manufacturing establishments, of extensive quarries, 
and of commercial enterprises of very many kinds. 
There is also the obligation of the general govern- 
ment that it shall have reserves against future 
needs, and that it shall protect the latent resources 
from exploitation and from waste. Great areas 
must be reserved for forests, as well as for other 
crops, and, in the nature of the case, these forest 
spaces in the future must be mostly in public owner- 
ship. 

Great remainders should be held by the people 
to be sold in small parcels to those who desire to 
get out to the backgrounds but who do not want 
to be farmers, where they may spend a vacation 
or renew themselves in the soil or under the trees, 
or by the green pastures or along the everlasting 
streams. It is a false assumption which supposes 
that if land cannot be turned into products of sale 
it is therefore valueless. The present active back- 
to-the-land movement has meaning to us here. It 
expresses the yearning of the people for contact 
with the earth and for escape from complexity and 
unessentials. As there is no regular way for at- 
taining these satisfactions, it has largely taken the 
form of farming, which occupation has also been 
re-estabhshed in popular estimation in the same 
epoch. It should not be primarily a back-to-the- 
f arm movement, however, and it is not to be derided. 

62 



The Public ProCTam 



iD' 



We are to recognize its meaning and to find some 
way of enabling more of the people to stand on the 
ground. 

Aside from all this, land is needed for human 
habitation, where persons may have space and may 
have the privilege of gathering about them the 
goods that add value to life. Much land will be 
needed in future for this habitation, not only be- 
cause there will be more people, but also because 
every person will be given an outlet. We know it 
is not right that any family should be doomed to 
the occupancy of a very few dreary rooms and 
deathly closets in the depths of great cities, seeing 
that all children are born to the natural sky and to 
the wind and to tlae earth. We do not yet see the 
way to allow them to have what is naturally theirs, 
but we shall learn how. In that day we shall take 
down the wonderful towers and cliffs in the cities, 
in which people work and live, shelf on shelf, but in 
which they have no home. The great city expansion 
in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendic- 
ular. We shall have many knots, clustered about 
factories and other enterprises, and we shall learn 
how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather 
than merely to assemble them. Before this time 
comes, we shall have passed the present insistence 
on so-called commercial efficiency, as if it were the 
sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall 

63 



The Holy Earth 

come to have control. All this will rest largely on 
the dividing of the land. 

It is the common assumption that the solution 
of these problems lies in facilities of transportation, 
and, to an extent, this is true; but this assumption 
usually rests on the other assumption, that the 
method of the present city vortex is the method of 
all time, with its violent rush into the vortex and 
out of it, consuming vastly of time and energy, pre- 
venting home leisure and destroying locality feel- 
ing, herding the people like cattle. The question of 
transportation is indeed a major problem, but it 
must be met in part by a different philosophy of 
human effort, settling the people in many small or 
moderate assemblages rather than in a few mighty 
congestions. It will be better to move the materials 
than to move the people. 

The great cities will grow larger; that is, they 
will cover more land. The smaller cities, the vil- 
lages, the country towns will take on greatly in- 
creased importance. We shall learn how to secure 
the best satisfactions when we live in villages as 
well as when we live in cities. We begin to plan 
our cities and to a small extent our villages. We 
now begin to plan the layout of the farms, that they 
may accomplish the best results. But the cities and 
the towns depend on the country that lies beyond; 
and the country beyond depends on the city and 

64 



The Public Program 

the town. The problem is broadly one problem, — ■ 
the problem of so dividing and subdividing the sur- 
face of the earth that there shall be the least con- 
flict between all these interests, that pubHc reserva- 
tions shall not be placed where it is better to have 
farms, that farming developments may not inter- 
fere with public utilities, that institutions may be 
so placed and with such area as to develop their 
highest usefulness, that the people desiring outlet 
and contact with the earth in their own right may 
be accorded that essential privilege. We have not 
yet begun to approach the subject in a fundamental 
way, and yet it is the primary problem of the occu- 
pancy of the planet. 

To the growing movement for city planning should 
be added an equal movement for country planning; 
and these should not proceed separately, but both 
together. No other public program is now more 
needed. 



65 



The honest day's work 

There is still another application of this problem 
of the land background. It is the influence that 
productive ownership exerts on the da^^'s work. 

Yesterday for some time I observed eight working 
men engaged in removing parts of a structure and 
loading the pieces on a freight-car. At no time were 
more than two of the men making any pretension 
of working at once, most of the time they were all 
visiting or watching passers-by, and in the whole 
period the eight men did not accomplish what one 
good honest man should have performed. I won- 
dered whether they had sufficient exercise to keep 
them in good health. They apparently were con- 
cerned about their "rights"; if the employer had 
rights they were undiscoverable. 

We know the integrity and effectiveness of the 
body of workmen; yet any reader who has formed 
a habit of observing men on day work and public 
work will recognize my account. Day men usually 
work in gangs, frequently too many of them to allow 
any one to labor effectively, and the whole process is 
likely to be mechanical, impersonal, often shiftless 
and pervaded with the highly developed skill of put- 
ting in the time and reducing the time to the mini- 

66 



The Honest Day's Work 

mum and of beginning to quit well in advance of the 
quitting time. The process of securing labor has 
become involved, tied up, and the labor is not ren- 
dered in a sufficient spirit of service. About the only 
free labor yet remaining to us is the month labor on 
the farm, even though it may be difficult to secure 
and be comprised largely of ineffective remainders. 

Over against all this is the importance of setting 
men at work singly and for themselves; this can 
be accomplished only when they own their property 
or have some real personal share in the production. 
The gang-spirit of labor runs into the politics of the 
group and constitutes the norm. If we are to have 
self-acting men they must be removed from close 
control, in labor as well as elsewhere. If it is neces- 
sary that any great proportion of the laboring men 
shall be controlled, then is it equally important that 
other men in sufficient numbers shall constitute the 
requisite counterbalance and corrective. It is 
doubtful whether any kind of profit-sharing in 
closely controlled industries can ever be as effec- 
tive in training responsible men for a democracy, 
other things being equal, as an occupation or series 
of occupations in which the worker is responsible 
for his own results rather than to an overseer, al- 
though the profit-sharing may for the time being 
develop the greater technical efficiency. 

The influence of ownership on the performance 
67 



The Holy Earth 

of the man is often well illustrated when the farm 
laborer or tenant becomes the proprietor. Some of 
my readers will have had experience in the difficult 
and doubtful process of trying to "run a farm'' at 
long range by means of ordinary hired help: the 
residence is uninhabitable; the tools are old and 
out of date, and some of them cannot be found; the 
well water is not good; the poultry is of the wrong 
breed, and the hens will not sit; the horses are not 
adapted to the work; the wagons must be painted 
and the harnesses replaced; the absolutely essential 
supplies are interminable; there must be more day 
labor. Now let this hired man come into the own- 
ership of the farm: presto! the house can be re- 
paired at almost no cost; the tools are good for some 
years yet; the harnesses can easily be mended; the 
absolutely essential supplies dwindle exceedingly; 
and the outside labor reduces itself to minor terms. 
Work with machinery, in factories, may proceed 
more rapidly because the operator must keep up 
with the machine; and there are also definite stand- 
ards or measures of performance. Yet even here 
it is not to be expected that the work will be much 
more than time-service. In fact, the very move- 
ment among labor is greatly to emphasize time- 
service, and often quite independently of justice. 
There must necessarily be a reaction from this atti- 
tude if we are to hope for the best human product. 

68 



The Honest Day's Work 

The best human product results from the bearing 
of responsibility; in a controlled labor body the re- 
sponsibility is shifted to the organization or to the 
boss. Assuredly the consolidating of labor is much 
to be desired if it is for the common benefit and for 
protection, and if it leaves the laborer free with 
his own product. Every person has the inalienable 
right to express himself, so long as it does not vio- 
late similar rights of his fellows, and to put forth his 
best production; if a man can best express himself 
in manual labor, no organization should suppress him 
or deny him that privilege. It is a sad case, and a 
denial of fundamental liberties, if a man is not al- 
lowed to work or to produce as much as he desires. 
Good development does not come from repression. 

Society recognizes its obligation to the laboring 
man of whatever kind and the necessity of safe- 
guarding him both in his own interest and because 
he stands at the very foundations; the laboring man 
bears an obligation to respond liberally with ser- 
vice and good-will. 

Is it desirable to have an important part of the 
labor of a people founded on ownership? Is it 
worth while to have an example in a large class of 
the population of manual work that is free-spirited, 
and not dominated by class interest and time- 
service? Is it essential to social progress that a 
day^s work shall be full measure? 

69 



The group reaction 

One of the interesting phenomena of human as- 
sociation is the arising of a certain standard or 
norm of moral action within the various groups 
that compose it. These standards may not be in- 
herently righteous, but they become so thoroughly 
established as to be enacted into law or even to 
be more powerful than law. So is it, as we have 
seen, with the idea of inalienable rights in natural 
property that may be held even out of all propor- 
tion to any proper use that the owners may be able 
to make of it; and so is it with the idea of invio- 
lable natural privileges to those who control facili- 
ties that depend on public patronage for their com- 
mercial success. The man himself may hold one 
kind of personal morals, but the group of which he 
is a part may hold a very different kind. It is our 
problem, in dealing with the resources of the earth, 
to develop in the group the highest expression of 
duty that is to be found in individuals. 

The restraint of the group, or the correction of 
the group action, is applied from the outside in the 
form of public opinion and in attack by other 
groups. The correction does not often arise from 

70 



The Group Reaction 

within. The estabHshing of many kinds of public - 
service bodies illustrates this fact. It is the check 
of society on group-selfishness. 

These remarks apply to the man who stands at 
the foundation of society, next the earth, as well 
as to others, although he has not organized to 
propagate the action of his class. The spoliation 
of land, the insufficient regard for it, the trifling 
with it, is much more than an economic deficiency. 
Society will demand either through the pressure of 
public opinion, or by regularized action, that the 
producing power of the land shall be safeguarded 
and increased, as I have indicated in an earlier 
part of the discussion. It will be better if it comes 
as the result of education, and thereby develops 
the voluntary feeling of obligation and responsibil- 
ity. At the same time, it is equally the responsi- 
bility of every other person to make it possible for 
the farmer to prosecute his business under the ex- 
pression of the highest standards. 

There is just now abroad amongst us a teaching 
to the effect that the farmer cannot afford to put 
much additional effort into his crop production, in- 
asmuch as the profit in an acre may not depend 
on the increase in yield, and therefore he does not 
carry an obligation to augment his acre-yields. 
This is a weakening philosophy. 

Undoubtedly there is a point beyond which he 
71 



The Holy Earth 

may not go with profit in the clTort to secure a 
heavy yield, for it may cost him too much to pro- 
duce the maximum; so it may not be profitable for 
a transportation company to maintain the highest 
possible speed. With this economic question I have 
nothing to do; but it is the farmer's moral responsi- 
bility to society to increase his production, and the 
stimulation reacts powerfully upon himself. It is a 
man's natural responsibility to do his best: it is 
specially important that the man at the bottom put 
forth his best efforts. To increase his yields is one 
of the ways in which he expresses himself as a man 
and applies his knowledge. This incentive taken 
away, agriculture loses one of its best endeavors, 
the occupation remains stationary or even deterio- 
rates, and society loses a moral support at the very 
point where it is most needed. 

If the economic conditions are such that the 
farmer cannot afford to increase his production, 
then the remedy is to be found without rather 
than by the repression of the producer. We are ex- 
pending vast effort to educate the farmer in the 
ways of better production, but we do not make it 
possible for him to apply this education to the best 
advantage. 

The real farmer, the one whom we so much de- 
light to honor, lias a strong moral regard for his 
land, for his animals, and his crops. These are es- 

72 



The Group Reaction 

tablished men, with highly developed obligations, 
feeling their responsibility to the farm on which 
they live. No nation can long persist that does 
not have this kind of citizenry in the background. 

I have spoken of one phase of the group reaction, 
as suggested in the attitude of the farmer. It may 
be interesting to recall, again, the fact that the pur- 
pose of farming is changing. The farmer is now 
adopting the outlook and the moral conduct of com- 
merce. His business is no longer to producte the 
supplies for his family and to share the small over- 
plus with society. lie grows or makes a certain 
line of produce that he sells for cash, and then he 
purchases his other supplies in the general market. 
The days of homespun are gone. The farmer is as 
much a buyer as a seller. Commercial methods 
and standards are invading the remotest communi- 
ties. This will have far-reaching results. Perhaps a 
fundamental shift in the moral basis of the agricul- 
tural occupations is slowly under way. 

The measuring of farming in terms of yields and 
incomes introduces a dangerous standard. It is 
commonly assumed that State moneys for agricul- 
ture-education may be used only for "practical" — 
that is, for dollars-and-cents — results, and the em- 
phasis is widely placed very exclusively on more 
alfalfa, more corn, more hogs, more fruit, on the 
two-blades-of-grass morals; and yet the highest 

73 



The Holy Earth 

good that can accrue to a State for the expenditure 
of its money is the raising up of a population less 
responsive to cash than to some other stimuli. The 
good physical support is indeed essential, but it is 
only the beginning of a process. I am conscious of 
a peculiar hardness in some of the agriculture- 
enterprise, with little real uplook; I hope that we 
may soon pass this cruder phase. 

Undoubtedly we are in the beginning of an epoch 
in rural affairs. We are at a formative period. We 
begin to consider the rural problem increasingly in 
terms of social groups. The attitudes that these 
groups assume, the way in which they react to their 
problems, will be determined in the broader as- 
pects for some time to come by the character of 
the young leadership that is now taking the field. 



74 



The spiritual contact with nature 

A useful contact with the earth places man not 
as superior to nature but as a superior intelligence 
working in nature as a conscious and therefore as 
a responsible i)art in a phin of evolution, which is 
a continuing creation. It distinguishes the ele- 
mental virtues as against the acquired, factitious, 
and pampered virtues. These strong and simple 
traits may be brought out easily and naturally if 
we incorporate into our schemes of education the 
solid experiences of tramping, camping, scouting, 
farming, handcraft, and other activities that are 
not mere refinements of subjective i)rocesses. 

Lack of training in the realities drives us to find 
satisfaction in all sorts of make-believes and in 
play-lives. The " movies " and many other develop- 
ments of our time make an appeal wholly beyond 
their merits, and they challenge the methods and 
intentions of education. 

There are more fundamental satisfactions than 
"thrills." There is more heart-ease in frugality 
than in surfeit. There is no real relish except when 
the appetite is keen. We are now provided with 
all sorts of things that nobody ever should want. 

75 



The Holy Earth 

The good spiritual reaction to nature is not a 
form of dogmatism or impressionism. It results 
normally from objective experience, when the per- 
son is ready for it and has good digestion. It should 
be the natural emotion of the man who knows his 
objects and does not merely dream about them. 
There is no hallucination in it. The remedy for 
some of the erratic "futurism" and other forms of 
illusion is to put the man hard against the facts: 
he might be set to studying bugs or soils or placed 
between the handles of a plow until such time as 
objects begin to take their natural shape and mean- 
ing in his mind. 

It is not within my purview here to consider the 
abstract righteous relation of man to the creation, 
nor to examine the major emotions that result from a 
contemplation of nature. It is only a very few of 
the simpler and more practical considerations that 
I may suggest. 

The training in solid experience naturally em- 
phasizes the righteousness of plain and simple eat- 
ing and drinking, and of frugality and control in 
pleasures. Many of the adventitious pleasures are 
in the highest degree pernicious and are indications 
of weakness. 

Considering the almost universal opinion that 
nature exhibits the merciless and relentless struggle 
of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it is 

76 



The Spiritual Contact with Nature 

significant that one of the most productive ways of 
training a youth in sensitiveness and in regard for 
other creatures is by means of the nature contact. 
Even if the person is taught that the strong and 
ferocious survive and conquer, he nevertheless soon 
comes to have the tenderest regard for every living 
thing if he has the naturist in him. He discards 
the idea that we lose virility when we cease to kill, 
and relegates the notion to the limbo of deceits. 
This only means that unconsciously he has experi- 
enced the truth in nature, and in practice has dis- 
carded the erroneous philosophy contained in books 
even though he may still give these philosophies 
his mental assent. 

It is exactly among the naturlsts that the old in- 
stinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an 
instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon 
takes its place. From another source, the instinct 
to kill dies out among the moralists and other people. 
And yet it is passing strange how this old survival 
— or is it a reversion? — holds its place amongst us, 
even in the higher levels. The punishment of a life 
for a life is itself a survival. Entertainment even 
yet plays upon this old memory of killing, as in 
books of adventure, in fiction, in playgames of 
children, and worst of all on the stage where this 
strange anachronism, even in plays that are not 
historic, is still portrayed in pernicious features and 

77 



The Holy Earth 

in a way that would rouse any community and 
violate law if it were enacted in real life. 

It is difficult to explain these survivals when we 
pretend to be so much shocked by the struggle for 
existence. We must accept the struggle, but we 
ought to try to understand .it. The actual suffer- 
ing among the creatures as the result of this struggle 
is probably small, and the bloody and ferocious con- 
test that we like to picture to ourselves is relatively 
insignificant. There is a righteous element in the 
struggle; or, more truthfully, the struggle itself is 
right. Every living and sentient thing persists by 
its merit and by its right. It persists within its 
sphere, and usually not in the sphere of some other 
creature. The weeding-out process is probably re- 
lated in some way with adaptability, but only re- 
motely with physical strength. It is a process of 
applying the test. The test is applied continuously, 
and not in some violent upheaval. 

If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle 
for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a pro- 
cess of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition. 

The elimination of the unessentials and of the 
survivals of a lower order of creation that have no 
proper place in human society, is the daily neces- 
sity of the race. The human struggle should not 
be on the plane of the struggle in the lower crea- 
tion, by the simple fact that the human plane is 

78 



The Spiritual Contact with Nature 

unlike; and those who contend that we should draw 
our methods of contest from wild nature would 
therefore put us back on the plane of the creatures 
w^e are supposed to have passed. If there is one 
struggle of the creeping things, if there is one strug- 
gle of the fish of the sea and another of the beasts of 
the field, and still another of the fowls of the air, 
then surely there must be still another order for 
those who have dominion. 



79 



The struggle for existence: war 

We may consider even further, although briefly, 
the nature of the struggle for existence in its spiritual 
relation. It would be violence to assume a holy 
earth and a holy production from the earth, if the 
contest between the creatures seems to violate all 
that we know as rightness. 

The notion of the contentious and sanguinary 
struggle for existence finds its most pronounced 
popular expression in the existence of human war. 
It is a wide-spread opinion that war is necessary in 
the nature of things, and, in fact, it has been not 
only justified but glorified on this basis. We may 
here examine this contention briefly, and we may 
ask whether, in the case of human beings, there are 
other suflficient means of personal and social devel- 
opment than by mortal combat with one's fellows. 
We may ask whether the principle of enmity or the 
principle of fellow feeling is the more important and 
controlling. 

We are not to deny or even to overlook the great 
results that have come from war. Virile races have 
forced themselves to the front and have impressed 

80 



The Struggle for Existence: War 

their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed 
and also assorted; lethargic folk have been galva- 
nized into activity; iron has been put into men's 
sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations 
and intrigues have been broken up (although new 
ones take their place). A kind of national purifi- 
cation may result from a great war. The state of 
human affairs has been brought to its present con- 
dition largely as the issue of wars. 

On the other hand, we are not to overlook the 
damaging results, the destruction, the anguish, the 
check to all productive enterprise, the hatred and 
revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable 
foreign spy system, the loss of standards, the de- 
moralization, the lessening respect and regard for 
the rights of the other, the breeding of human 
parasites that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the 
levying of tribute, the setting up of unnatural 
boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial 
developments which, so far as we can see, gave 
every promise of great results. We naturally extol 
the nations that have survived; we do not know 
how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed 
to military conquest, or how many racial possibilities 
may have been suppressed in their beginnings. 

Vast changes in mental attitudes may result from 
a great war, and the course of civilization may be 
deflected; and while we adjust ourselves to these 

81 



The Holy Earth 

changes, no one may say at the time that they are 
just or even that they are temporarily best. We 
are never able at the moment to measure the effects 
of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not 
have been conquered; these results work themselves 
out in tribulation and perhaps in loss of effort and 
of racial standards through rnany weary centuries. 
Force, or even "success/' cannot justify theft. 

But even assuming the great changes that have 
arisen from w^ar, this is not a justification of war; 
it only states a fact, it only provides a measure of 
the condition of society at any epoch. It is prob- 
able that war will still exert a mighty even if a less- 
ening influence; it may still be necessary to resort 
to arms to w^in for a people its natural opportunity 
and to free a race from bondage; and if any people 
has a right to its own existence, it has an equal 
right and indeed a duty to defend itself. But this 
again only indicates the wretched state of develop- 
ment in which we live. Undoubtedly, also, a cer- 
tain amount of military training is very useful, but 
there should be other ways, in a democracy, to se- 
cure something of this needful training. 

The struggle for existence, as expressed in human 
combat, does not necessarily result in the survival 
of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define 
desirability. We are confusing very unlike situa- 
tions in our easy application of the struggle for ex- 

82 



The Struggle for Existence: War 

istence to war. The struggle is not now between 
mdividuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast 
bodies hurUng death by wholesale. We pick the 
physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and 
these fit are slain. This is not the situation in 
nature from which we draw our illustrations. More- 
over, the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, 
not power. Adaptation and adjustment mean 
peace, not war. Physical force has been immensely 
magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the 
great nations as "powers," a terminology that 
some day we shall regret. The military method of 
civilization finds no justification in the biological 
struggle for existence. 

The final conquest of a man is of himself, and 
he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. 
The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it 
shall then be greater than when it conquers its 
neighboring society. 

Man now begins to measure himself against na- 
ture also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie 
his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by 
this means shall he conquer himself ,— by great feats 
of engineering, by completer utilization of the pos- 
sibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the 
unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; 
and in these fields shall be the heroes. The most 
virile and upstanding qualities can find expression 

83 



The Holy Earth 

in the conquest of the earth. In the contest with 
the planet every man may feel himself grow. 

What we have done in times past shows the way 
by which we have come; it does not provide a program 
of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, 
then we deny the effective evolution of the race. We 
have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, the in- 
quisition, subjugation of women^, the enslavement of 
our fellows except alone enslavement in w^ar. 

Here I come particularly to a consideration of the 
struggle for existence. Before I enter on this sub- 
ject, I must pause to say that I would not of my- 
self found an argument either for war or against it 
on the analogies of the struggle for existence. Man 
has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions 
that obtain in the lower creation. Man is a moral 
agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. 
But the argument for war is so often founded on 
this struggle in nature, that the question must be 
considered. 

It has been persistently repeated for years that in 
nature the weakest perish and that the victory is 
with the strong, meaning by that the physically 
powerful. This is a false analogy and a false bi- 
ology. It leads men far astray. It is the result 
of a misconception of the teaching of evolution. 

Our minds dwell on the capture and the carnage 
in nature, — the hawk swooping on its prey, the cat 

84 



The Struggle for Existence: War 

stealthily watching for the mouse, wolves hunting in 
packs, ferocious beasts lying in wait, sharks that 
follow ships, serpents with venomous fangs, the vast 
range of parasitism; and with the poet we say that 
nature is "red in tooth and claw." Of course, we 
are not to deny the struggle of might against might, 
which is mostly between individuals, and of which 
we are all aware; but the weak and the fragile and 
the small are the organisms that have persisted. 
There are thousands of little and soft things still 
abundant in the world that have outlived the fear- 
some ravenous monsters of ages past; there were 
Goliaths in those days, but the Davids have out- 
lived them, and Gath is not peopled by giants. 
The big and strong have not triumphed. 

The struggle in nature is not a combat, as we 
commonly understand that word, and it is not war- 
fare. The earth is not strewn with corpses. 

I was impressed in reading Roosevelt's "African 
Game Trails" with the great extent of small and 
defenseless and fragile animal life that abounds in 
the midst of the terrible beasts, — little uncoura- 
geous things that hide in the crevices, myriads that 
fly in the air, those that ride on the rhinos, that 
Bwim and hide in the pools, and bats that hang in 
the acacia-trees. He travelled in the region of the 
lion, in the region that "holds the mightiest crea- 
tures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it 

85 



The Holy Earth 

also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, 
no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies 
of the rocks, and in the tree tops. There are ante- 
lope smaller than hares and antelope larger than 
oxen. There are creatures which are the embodi- 
ment of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness 
is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains 
are alive with droves of strange and beautiful ani- 
mals whose like is not known elsewhere." The lion 
is mighty; he is the king of beasts; but he keeps 
his place and he has no kingdom. He has not mas- 
tered the earth. No beast has ever overcome the 
earth; and the natural world has never been con- 
quered by muscular force. 

Nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one 
part with another. 

My friend went to a far country. He told me 
that he was most impressed with the ferocity, chiefly 
of wild men. It came my time to go to that coun- 
try. I saw that men had been savage, — men are 
the most ferocious of animals, and the ferocity has 
never reached its high point of refined fury until 
to-day. (Of course, savages fight and slay; this is 
because they are savages.) But I saw also that these 
savage men are passing away. I saw animals that 
had never tasted blood, that had no means of de- 
fense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were 
multiplying. Every stone that I upturned dis* 

80 



The Struggle for Existence: War 

closed some tender organism; every bush that I dis- 
turbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; 
every spot where I walked bore some delicate plant, 
and I recalled the remark of Sir J. William Dawson 
"that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient 
than the mountains or plains on which they live"; 
and if I went on the sea, I saw the medusae, as frail 
as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine streaming 
through them, yet holding their own in the mighty 
upheaval of the oceans; and I reflected on the 
myriads of microscopic things that for untold ages 
had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean 
rests. The minor things and the weak things are 
the most numerous, and they have played the 
greatest part in the polity of nature. So I came 
away from that far country impressed with the 
power of the little feeble things. I had a new under- 
standing of the worth of creatures so unobtrusive 
and so silent that the multitude does not know them. 
I saw protective colorings; I saw fleet wings and 
swift feet; I saw the ability to hide and to conceal; 
I saw habits of adaptation; I saw marvellous powers 
of reproduction. You have seen them in every 
field; you have met them on your casual walks, 
until you accept them as the natural order of things. 
And you know that the beasts of prey have not 
prevailed. The whole contrivance of nature is to 
protect the weak. 

87 



The Holy Earth 

We have wrongly visualized the "struggle." We 
have given it an intensely human application. We 
need to go back to Darwin who gave significance to 
the phrase "struggle for existence." "I use this 
term/' he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, 
including dependence of one being on another, and 
including (which is more important) not only the 
life of the individual, but success in leaving prog- 
eny." The dependence of one being on another, 
success in leaving progeny, — how accurate and how 
far-seeing was Darwin ! 

I hope that I speak to naturists and to farmers. 
They know how diverse are the forms of life; and 
they know that somehow these forms live together 
and that only rarely do whole races perish by sub- 
jugation. They know that the beasts do not set 
forth to conquer, but only to gain subsistence and 
to protect themselves. The beasts and birds do not 
pursue indiscriminately. A hen-hawk does not at- 
tack crows or butterflies. Even a vicious bull does 
not attack fowls or rabbits or sheep. The great 
issues are the issues of live and let-live. There are 
whole nations of plants, more unlike than nations 
of humankind, living together in mutual interde- 
pendence. There are nations of quiet and might- 
less animals that live in the very regions of the 
mighty and the stout. And we are glad it is so. 

Consider the mockery of invoking the struggle 
88 



The Struggle for Existence: War 

for existence as justification for a battle on a June 
morning, when all nature is vibrant with life and com- 
petition is severe, and when, if ever, we are to look 
for strife. But the very earth breathes peace. The 
fulness of every field and wood is in complete ad- 
justment. The teeming multitudes of animal and 
plant have found a way to live together, and we 
look abroad on a vast harmony, verdurous, prolific, 
abounding. Into this concord, project your holo- 
caust I 



The daily fare 

Some pages back, I said something about the es- 
sential simplicity in habit of life that results from the 
nature contact, and I illustrated the remark by call- 
ing attention to the righteousness of simple eating 
and drinking. Of course, the eating must be sub- 
stantial, but the adventitious appetites accomplish 
nothing and they may be not only intemperate 
and damaging to health but even unmoral. Yet 
it is not alone the simplicity of the daily fare that 
interests me here, but the necessity that it shall 
be as direct as possible from the ground or the sea, 
and that it shall be undisguised and shall have 
meaning beyond the satisfying of the appetite. 

I was interested in Tusser's "Christmas hus- 
bandly fare," notwithstanding some suggestion of 
gluttony in it and of oversupply. There is a certain 
vigor and good relish about it, and lack of osten- 
tation, that seem to suggest a lesson. 

It was more than three centuries ago that native 
Thomas Tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, 
gave to the world his incomparable "Five Hun- 
dred Points of Good Husbandry." He covered the 
farm year and the farm work as completely as 

90 



The Daily Fare 

Vergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries 
before; and he left us sketches of the countryside 
of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and 
quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. He cele- 
brated the Christmas festival with much conviction, 
and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving 
his satisfactions from the things that the land pro- 
duces. His sketches are wholesome reading in these 
days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, 
and compounded by impersonal devices and con- 
densed into packages that go into every house alike. 
Thomas Tusser would celebrate with "things 
handsome to have, as they ought to be had." His 
board would not be scant of provisions, for he seems 
not to have advised the simple life in the way of 
things good to eat; but he chose good raw mate- 
rials, and we can imagine that the "good husband 
and huswife" gave these materials their best com- 
pliments and prepared them with diligence and 
skill. Not once does he suggest that these mate- 
rials be secured from the market, or that any im- 
ported labor be employed in the preparation of 
them. 

"Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall, 
Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal." 

Here is the whole philosophy of the contented 
festival, — the fruit of one's labor, the common gen- 

91 



The Holy Earth 

uine materials, and the cheer of the family fireside. 
The day is to be given over to the spirit of the cele- 
bration; every common object will glow with a new 
consecration, and everything will be good, — even 
the mustard will be good withal. What a contempt 
old TusscT would have had for all the imported and 
fabricated condiments and trivialities that now come 
to our tables in packages suggestive of medicines 
and drugs ! And how ridiculously would they have 
stood themselves beside the brawn, pudding, and 
souse I A few plain accessories, every one stout 
and genuine, and in good quantity, must accom- 
pany the substantialities that one takes with a free 
hand directly from the land that one manages. 

It surprises us that he had such a bountiful list 
from which to draw, and yet the kinds are not more 
than might be secured from any good land property, 
if one set about securing them: 

"Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best, 
Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest. 
Cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear, 
As then in the country, is counted good cheer." 

In these days we should draw less heavily on the 
meats, for in the three centuries we have gained 
greatly in the vegetable foods. Tusser did not have 
the potato. But nevertheless, these materials are 
of the very bone of the land. They grow up with 

92 



The Daily Fare 

the year and out of the conditions, and they have 
all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the 
dew of morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and 
the work of laborious hands. Every one of them 
means something to the person who raises them, 
and there is no impersonality in them. John's 
father drained the land when yet he was a boy; 
the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid 
out in its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a 
part of it; every stall in the stables and every win- 
dow-seat in the old house hold memories; and John 
has grown up with these memories, and with these 
fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over 
brooks and amongst the herds of cattle. It is a 
part of his religion to keep the land well; and these 
supplies at Christmas time are taken with a deep 
reverence for the goodness that is in them, and with 
a pride in having produced them. 

And Thomas Tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced 
that these bounties cost no cash: 

"What cost to good husband, is any of this? 
Good household provision only it is. 
Of other the like, I do leave out a many 
That costeth a husbandman never a penny." 

To farm well; to provide well; to produce it one- 
self; to be independent of trade, so far as this is 
possible in the furnishing of the table,— these are 

93 



The Holy Earth 

good elements in living. And in this day we are 
rapidly losing all this; many persons already have 
lost it; many have never known the satisfaction 
of it. Most of us must live from the box and the 
bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our 
cattle from the factory and the bag. The farmer 
now raises a few prime products to sell, and then 
he buys his foods in the markets under label and 
tag; and he knows not who produced the materials, 
and he soon comes not to care. No thought of the 
seasons, and of the men and women who labored, 
of the place, of the kind of soil, of the special con- 
tribution of the native earth, come with the trade- 
mark or the brand. And so we all live mechani- 
cally, from shop to table, without contact, and 
irreverently. 

May we not once in the year remember the earth 
in the food that we eat ? May we not in some way, 
even though we live in town, so organize our Christ- 
mas festival that the thought of the goodness of the 
land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our 
celebration? May we not for once reduce to the 
very minimum the supply of manufactured and 
sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at 
least in spirit, to a "Christmas husbandly fare?" 

Yet, Thomas Tusser would not confine his hus- 
bandly fare to the Christmas time. In another 
poem, he gives us "The farmer's daily diet," in which 

94 



The Daily Fare 

the sturdy products are still much the same, secured 
and prepared by those who partake. All this may 
be little applicable literally in our present living, 
and yet I think it is easily possible, as certainly it 
is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward 
the table fare, avoiding much unnecessary and in- 
significant household labor and lending an attitude 
of good morality to the daily sustenance. 

Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious 
waste of time, and also of human energy that might 
be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive 
how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive 
methods could have come into use. Perhaps they 
originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic 
society, when an abundance of servants must be 
trained to serve and when distinctions in eating 
were a part of the distinction in rank. But to 
have introduced these laborious and unintelligent 
methods into hotels, where persons tarry for com- 
fort and into homes that do not need to maintain 
an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous 
imitation. The numbers of courses, with more ser- 
vice than food, that one often meets at the table 
d^hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are most 
exasperating to one who values time and has a 
serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the 
bodily apparatus. Here is the performance — it was 
nothing more than a performance, consisting in re- 

95 



The Holy Earth 

peated changing of all the dishes, the removing of 
every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small 
separate parcels of food — that it was my lot to en- 
dure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that 
had little else to distinguish it: 

Course 1. Dry bread (no butter). 

Removal. 
Course 2. Soup (nothing else). 

Removal. 
Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side. 

Removal. 
Course 4. Veal, macaroni. 

Removal. 
Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else). 

Removal. 
Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary). 

Removal. 
Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake 

Removal. 
Course 8. Fruit (slight). 

Removal. 
Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker. 

Removal. 
Course 10. Coffee. 

Relief. 

The traveler knows that this species of time- 
wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not 
unusual and does not merit such considerate at- 
tention, although it may profit by the magnifica- 
tion. All this contributes nothing to human effi- 
ciency — quite the reverse — and certainly nothing to 

96 



The DaUy Fare 

the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's sub- 
sistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious use- 
lessness is quite immoral. 

I am afraid that our food habits very well rep- 
resent how far we have moved away from the essen- 
tials and how much we have misled ourselves as 
to the standards of excellence. I looked in a cook- 
book to learn how to serve potatoes: I found twenty- 
three recipes, every one of which was apparently 
designed to disguise the fact that they were pota- 
toes; and yet there is really nothing in a potato 
to be ashamed of. Of course, this kind of decep- 
tion is not peculiar to cookery. It is of the same 
piece as the stamping of the metal building cover- 
ings in forms to represent brick and stone, although 
everybody knows that they are not brick and stone, 
rather than to make a design that shall express 
metal and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same 
kind also as the casting of cement blocks to rep- 
resent undressed rock, although every one is aware 
of the deception, rather than to develop a form that 
will express cement blocks as brick expresses brick; 
of the same order as the inflating of good whole- 
some v/ater by carbonic gas; and all the other de- 
ceits in materials on which our common affairs are 
built. It is, of course, legitimate to present our 
foods in many forms that we may secure variety 
even with scant and common materials; but dan- 

97 



The Holy Earth 

ger may He in any untruthfulness with which we 
use the raw materials of life. 

So cookery has come to be a process of conceal- 
ment. Not only does it conceal the materials, but 
it also conceals the names of them in a ridiculous 
nomenclature. Apparently, the higher the art of 
cookery, the greater is the mejit of complete con- 
cealment. I think that one reason why persons en- 
joy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and 
other elemental folk, is because of its comparative 
lack of disguise, although they may not be aware of 
this merit of it. We have so successfully disguised 
our viands through so many years that it is not 
"good form" to make inquiries: we may not smell 
the food, although the odor should be one of the 
best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits 
and flowers. We may smell a parsnip or a potato 
when it grows in the field, but not when it is 
cooked. 

We add the extrinsic and meaningless odors of 
spices and flavorings, forgetting that odor no less 
than music hath occasions; each of the materials 
has its own odor that the discriminating cook 
will try to bring out in its best expression. Were 
we to be deprived of all these exotic seasonings, un- 
doubtedly cookery would be the gainer in the end; 
nor could we so readily disguise materials that in 
themselves are not fit to eat. There is a reason 

98 



The DaHy Fare 

why "all foods taste alike," as we often hear it 
said of the cooking in public places. 

Moreover, we want everything that is out of 
season, necessitating great attention to the arts of 
preserving and requiring still further fabrication; 
and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the 
seasons when they come in their natural sequence, 
bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted 
to the time and to the place. We can understand, 
then, why it so happens that we neglect the cookery 
of the common foods, as seeming to be not quite 
worth the while, and expend ourselves with so much 
effort on the accessories and the frills. I have been 
interested to observe some of the instruction in cook- 
ing, — how it often begins with little desserts, and 
fudge, and a variety of dib-dabs. This is much 
like the instruction in manual training that begins 
with formal and meaningless model work or triviali- 
ties and neglects the issues of life. It is much like 
some of the teaching in agriculture not so many years 
ago, before we attacked very effectively the serious 
problems of wheat and alfalfa and forests and mar- 
kets. Mastery does not lie in these pieces of play 
work, nor does the best intellectual interest on the 
part of the student reside in them. 

Result is that one finds the greatest difficulty in 
securing a really good baked potato, a well-cooked 
steak, or a wholesome dish of apple-sauce that is 

99 



The Holy Earth 

not strained and flavored beyond recognition. It is 
nearly impossible for one to secure an egg fried hard 
and yet very tender and that has not been "turned " 
or scorched on the edges, — this is quite the test of 
the skill of the good cook. The notion that a hard 
fried egg is dangerously indigestible is probably a 
fable of poor cookery. One can secure many sophis- 
ticated and disguised egg dishes, but I think skill 
in plainly cooking eggs is almost an unknown art, 
perhaps a little-practised art. 

Now, it is on these simple and essential things 
that I would start my instruction in cookery; and 
this not only for the gain to good eating but also 
for the advantage of vigor and good morals. I am 
afraid that our cooking does not set a good example 
before the young three times every day in the year; 
and how eager are the young and how amenable to 
suggestion at these three blessed epochs every day 
in the year ! 

Some unsympathetic reader will say that I am 
drawing a long bow; yet undoubtedly our cookery 
has prepared the public mind for the adulteration. 
Knowing the elaboration of many of the foods and 
fancy dishes, the use of flavoring and spice and 
other additions to disguise unwholesome materials, 
the addition of coloring matter to make things at- 
tractive, the mixtures, the elaborate designs and 
trimmings and concoctions, and various deceptions, 
100 



The Dafly Fare 

one wonders how far is the step from some of the 
cookery to some of the adulteration and whether 
these processes are really all of one piece. I will 
leave with my reader a paragraph assembled from a 
statement made by a food chemist but a few years 
ago, to let him compare adulteration with what is 
regarded as legitimate food preparation and note the 
essential similarity of many of the processes. I do 
not mean to enter the discussion of food adultera- 
tion, and I do not know whether these sophistica- 
tions are true at the present day; but the statement 
describes a situation in which we found ourselves 
and indicates what had become a staggering infidel- 
ity in the use of the good raw materials. 

Hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; 
bologna sausage and similar meats until recently 
usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. 
"Pancake flour" often contains little if any buck- 
wheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to 
improve its appearance. Fancy French peas are 
colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup 
usually contains benzoate of soda as a preserva- 
tive. Japanese tea is colored with cyanide of 
potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually 
contains a large quantity of added starch and is 
colored with tumeric. Ground coffee has recently 
been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called non- 
alcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or 
101 



The Holy Earth 

a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with 
aniline. Candy is commonly colored with aniline 
dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent 
evaporation. Cheap candies contain such sub- 
stances as glue and soapstone. The higher-priced 
kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. Flavor- 
ing extracts seldom are made from pure products 
and usually are artificially colored. Jams are made 
of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter 
and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they 
are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is 
itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, 
aniline dye, and flavoring. Lard nearly always con- 
tains added tallow. Bakeries in large cities have 
used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap 
ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. 
Cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. The poison 
saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared 
sweetened products. 

The attentive reader of the public prints in the 
recent years can greatly extend this humiliating 
recital if he choose. It is our habit to attach all 
the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to 
excuse them; but we usually find that there are 
contributory causes and certainly there must be 
reasons. Has our daily fare been honest ? 



102 



The admiration of good materials 

Not even yet am I done with this plain problem 
of the daily fare. The very fact that it is daily — 
thrice daily — and that it enters so much into the 
thought and effort of every one of us, makes it a 
subject of the deepest concern from every point of 
view. The aspect of the case that I am now to re- 
assert is the effect of much of our food preparation 
in removing us from a knowledge of the good raw 
materials that come out of the abounding earth. 

Let us stop to admire an apple. I see a com- 
mittee of the old worthies in some fruit-show going 
slowly and discriminatingly among the plates of 
fruits, discussing the shapes and colors and sizes, 
catching the fragrance, debating the origins and 
the histories, and testing them with the utmost 
precaution and deliberation; and I follow to hear 
their judgment. 

This kind of apple is very perfect in spherical 
form, deeply cut at the stem, well ridged at the 
shallow crater, beautifully splashed and streaked 
with carmine-red on a yellowish green under-color, 
finely flecked with dots, slightly russet on the shaded 
side, apparently a good keeper; its texture is fine- 
grained and uniform, flavor mildly subacid, the qual- 
103 



The Holy Earth 

ity good to very good; if the tree is hardy and produc- 
tive, this variety is to be recommended to the ama- 
teur for further trial I The next sample is somewhat 
elongated in form, rather below the average in 
color, the stem very long and well set and indi- 
cating a fruit that does not readily drop in wind- 
storms, the texture exceedingly melting but the 
flavor slightly lacking in character and therefore 
rendering it of doubtful value for further test. An- 
other sample lacks decidedly in quality, as judged 
by the specimens on the table, and the exhibitor is 
respectfully recommended to withdraw it from fu- 
ture exhibitions; another kind has a very pronounced 
aromatic odor, which will commend it to persons 
desiring to grow a choice collection of interesting 
fruits; still another is of good si^e, very firm and 
solid, of uniform red color, slightly oblate and there- 
fore lending itself to easy packing, quality fair to 
good, and if the tree bears such uniform samples as 
those shown on the table it apparently gives prom- 
ise of some usefulness as a market sort. My older 
friends, if they have something of the feeling of the 
pomologist, can construct the remainder of the 
picture. 

In physical perfectness of form and texture and 

color, there is nothing in all the world that exceeds 

a well-grown fruit. Let it lie in the palm of your 

hand. Close your fingers slowly about it. Feel it§ 

104 



The Admiration of Good Materials 

firm or soft and modelled surface. Put it against 
your cheek, and inhale its fragrance. Trace its 
neutral under-colors, and follow its stripes and mark 
its dots. If an apple, trace the eye that lies in a 
moulded basin. Note its stem, how it stands firmly 
in its cavity, and let your imagination run back to 
the tree from which, when finally mature, it parted 
freely. This apple is not only the product of your 
labor, but it holds the essence of the year and it is 
in itself a thing of exquisite beauty. There is no 
other rondure and no other fragrance like this. 

I am convinced that we need much to cultivate 
this appreciation of the physical perfectness of the 
fruits that we grow. We cannot afford to lose this 
note from our lives, for this may contribute a good 
part of our satisfaction of being in the world. The 
discriminating appreciation that one applies to a 
picture or a piece of sculpture may be equally ap- 
plied to any fruit that grows on the commonest 
tree or bush in our field or to any animal that stands 
on a green pasture. It is no doubt a mark of a 
well-tempered mind that it can understand the sig- 
nificance of the forms in fruits and plants and ani- 
mals and apply it in the work of the day. 

I sometimes think that the rise of the culinary 

arts is banishing this fine old appreciation of fruits 

in their natural forms. There are so many ways 

of canning and preserving and evaporating and ex- 

105 



The Holy Earth 

tracting the juices, so many disguises and so much 
fabrication, that the fruit is lost in the process. 
The tin-can and the bottle seem to have put an 
insuperable barrier between us and nature, and it 
is difficult for us to get back to a good munch of 
real apples under a tree or by the fireside. The 
difficulty is all the greater in pur congested city life 
where orchards and trees are only a vacant mem- 
ory or stories told to the young, and where the 
space in the larder is so small that apples must be 
purchased by the quart. The eating of good apples 
out of hand seems to be almost a lost art. Only 
the most indestructible kinds, along with leather- 
skinned oranges and withered bananas, seem to be 
purchasable in the market. The discriminating 
apple-eater in the Old World sends to a grower for 
samples of the kinds that he grows; and after the 
inquirer has tested them in the family, and dis- 
cussed them, he orders his winter supply. The 
American leaves the matter to the cook and she 
orders plain apples; and she gets them. 

I wonder whether in time the perfection of fabri- 
cation will not reach such a point that some fruits 
will be known to the great public only by the pic- 
ture on the package or on the bottle. Every process 
that removes us one step farther from the earth 
is a distinct loss to the people, and yet we are rap- 
idly coming into the habit of taking all things at 
106 



The Admiration of Good Materials 

second hand. My objection to the wine of the 
grape is not so much a question of abstinence as 
of the fact that I find no particular satisfaction in 
the shape and texture of a bottle. 

If one has a sensitive appreciation of the beauty 
in form and color and modelling of the common 
fruits, he will find his interest gradually extending 
to other products. Some time ago I visited Hood 
River Valley in company with a rugged potato- 
grower from the Rocky Mountains. We were 
amazed at the wonderful scenery, and captivated 
by the beauty of the fruits. In one orchard the 
owner showed us with much satisfaction a brace of 
apples of perfect form and glowing colors. When 
the grower had properly expounded the marvels of 
Hood River apples, which he said were the finest 
in the world, my friend thrust his hand into his 
pocket and pulled out a potato, and said to the 
man: "Why is not that just as handsome as a 
Hood River apple?" And sure enough it was. 
For twenty-five years this grower had been raising 
and selecting the old Peachblow potato, until he 
had a form much more perfect than the old Peach- 
blow ever was, with a uniform delicate pink skin, 
smooth surface, comely shape, and medium size, and 
with eyes very small and scarcely sunken; and my 
Hood River friend admitted that a potato as well 
as an apple may be handsome and satisfying to the 
107 



The Holy Earth 

hand and to the eye, and well worth carrying in one's 
pocket. But this was a high-bred potato, and not 
one of the common lot. 

This episode of the potato allows me another op- 
portunity to enforce my contention that we lose 
the fruit or the vegetable in the processes of cook- 
ery. The customary practice ■ of "mashing" po- 
tatoes takes all the individuality out of the product, 
and the result is mostly so much starch. There is an 
important dietary side to this. Cut a thin slice across 
a potato and hold it to the light. Note the interior 
undifferentiated mass, and then the thick band of 
rind surrounding it. The potato flavor and a large 
part of the nutriment lie in this exterior. We slice 
this part away and fry, boil, or otherwise fuss up 
the remainder. When we mash it, we go still far- 
ther and break down the potato texture; and in the 
modern method we squeeze and strain it till we 
eliminate every part of the potato, leaving only a 
pasty mass, which, in my estimation, is not fit to 
eat. The potato should be cooked with the rind on, 
if it is a good potato, and if it is necessary to re- 
move th.e outer skin the process should be per- 
formed after the cooking. The most toothsome part 
of the potato is in these outer portions, if the tuber 
is well grown and handled. We have so sophis- 
ticated the potato in the modern disguised cookery 
that we often practically ruin it as an article of 
108 



The Admiration of Good Materials 

food, and we have bred a race of people that sees 
nothing to admire in a good and well-grown potato 
tuber. 

I now wish to take an excursion from the potato 
to the pumpkin. In all the range of vegetable prod- 
ucts, I doubt whether there is a more perfect ex- 
ample of pleasing form, fine modelling, attractive 
texture and color, and more bracing odor, than in 
a well-grown and ripe field pumpkin. Place a pump- 
kin on your table; run your fingers down its smooth 
grooves; trace the furrows to the poles; take note 
of its form; absorb its rich color; get the tang of 
its fragrance. The roughness and ruggedness of its 
leaves, the sharp-angled stem strongly set, make a 
foil that a sculptor cannot improve. Then wonder 
how this marvellous thing was born out of your 
garden soil through the medium of one small strand 
of a succulent stem. 

We all recognize the appeal of a bouquet of flow- 
ers, but we are unaware that we may have a bou- 
quet of fruits. We have given little attention to 
arranging them, or any study of the kinds that con- 
sort well together, nor have we receptacles in which 
effectively to display them. Yet, apples and oranges 
and plums and grapes and nuts, and good melons 
and cucumbers and peppers and carrots and onions, 
may be arranged into the most artistic and satisfying 
combinations. 

109 



The Holy Earth 

I would fall short of my obligation if I were to 
stop with the fruit of the tree and say nothing about 
the tree or the plant itself. In our haste for lawn 
trees of new kinds and from the uttermost parts, 
we forget that a fruit-tree is ornamental and that 
it provides acceptable shade. A full-grown apple- 
tree or pear-tree is one of the most individual and 
picturesque of trees. The foliage is good, the blos- 
soms as handsome as those of fancy imported things, 
the fruits always interesting, and the tree is reli- 
able. Nothing is more interesting than an orange 
tree, in the regions where it grows, with its shining 
and evergreen leaves and its continuing flowers and 
fruits. The practice of planting apples and pears 
and sweet cherries, and other fruit and nut trees, 
for shade and adornment is much to be commended 
in certain places. 

But the point I wish specially to urge in this con- 
nection is the value of many kinds of fruit-trees in 
real landscape work. We think of these trees as 
single or separate specimens, but they may be used 
with good result in mass planting, when it is de- 
sired to produce a given effect in a large area or 
in one division of a property. I do not know that 
any one has worked out full plans for the combin- 
ing of fruit-trees, nuts, and berry-bearing plants into 
good treatments, but it is much to be desired that 
this shall be done. Any of you can picture a sweep 
110 



The Admiration of Good Materials 

of countryside planted to these things that would 
be not only novel and striking, but at the same 
time conformable to the best traditions of artistic 
rendering. 

I think it should be a fundamental purpose in 
our educational plans to acquaint the people with 
the common resources of the region, and particu- 
larly with those materials on which we subsist. If 
this is accepted, then we cannot deprive our parks, 
highways, and school grounds of the trees that bear 
the staple fruits. It is worth while to have an 
intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. I know a fruit- 
grovv^er who secures many prizes for his apples and 
his pears; when he secures a blue ribbon, he ties 
it on the tree that bore the fruit. 

The admiration of a good domestic animal is 
much to be desired. It develops a most responsible 
attitude in the man or the woman. I have observed 
a peculiar charm in the breeders of these wonderful 
animals, a certain poise and masterfulness and 
breadth of sympathy. To admire a good horse 
and to know just why he admires him is a great re- 
source to any man, as also to feel the responsibility 
for the care and health of any flock or herd. Fowls, 
pigs, sheep on their pastures, cows, mules, all per- 
fect of their kind, all sensitive, all of them marvel- 
lous in their forms and powers, — verily these are 
good to know. 

Ill 



The Holy Earth 

If the raw materials grow out of the holy earth, 
then a man should have pride in producing them, 
and also in handUng them. As a man thinketh of 
his materials, so doth he profit in the use of them. 
He builds them into himself. There is a wide-spread 
feeHng that in some way tfcese materials reflect 
themselves in a man's bearing. One type of man 
grows out of the handling o/ rocks, another out of 
the handHng of fishes, anocher out of the growing 
of the products from the good earth. All irrever- 
ence in the handling of these materials that come 
out of the earth's bounty, and all waste and poor 
workmanship, make for a low spiritual expression. 

The farmer specially should be proud of his ma- 
terials, he is so close to the sources and so hard 
against the backgrounds. Moreover, he cannot 
conceal his materials. He cannot lock up his farm 
or disguise his crops. He lives on his farm, and 
visibly with his products. The architect does not 
live in the houses and temples he builds. The en- 
gineer does not live on his bridge. The miner does 
not live in his mine. Even the sailor has his home 
away from his ship. But the farmer cannot sep- 
arate himself from his works. Every bushel of 
buckwheat and every barrel of apples and every 
bale of cotton bears his name; the beef that he takes 
to market, the sheep that he herds on his pastures, 
the horse that he drives, — these are his products 
112 



The Admiration of Good Materials 

and they carry his name. He should have the same 
pride in these — his productions — as another who 
builds a machine, or another who writes a book 
about them. The admiration of a field of hay, of 
a cow producing milk, of a shapely and fragrant 
head of cabbage, is a great force for good. 

It would mean much if we could celebrate the raw 
materials and the products. Particularly is it good 
to celebrate the yearly bounty. The Puritans rec- 
ognized their immediate dependence on the products 
of the ground, and their celebration was connected 
with religion. I should be sorry if our celebrations 
were to be wholly secular. 

We have been much given to the display of 
fabricated materials, — of the products of looms, 
lathes, foundries, and many factories of skill. We 
also exhibit the agricultural produce, but largely in 
a crass and rude way to display bulk and to win 
prizes. We now begin to arrange our exhibitions 
for color effect, comparison, and educational influ- 
ence. But we do not justly understand the nat- 
ural products when we confine them to formal ex- 
hibitions. They must be incorporated into many 
celebrations, expressing therein the earth's bounty 
and our appreciation of it. The usual and com- 
mon products, domesticated and wild, should be 
gathered in these occasions, and not for competi- 
tion or for prize awards or even for display, but 
113 



The Holy Earth 

for their intrinsic qualities. An apple day or an 
apple sabbath would teach the people to express 
their gratitude for apples. The moral obligation 
to grow good apples, to handle them honestly, to 
treat the soil and the trees fairly and reverently, 
could be developed as a living practical philosophy 
into the working-days of an apple-growing people. 
The technical knowledge we now possess requires 
the moral support of a stimulated public apprecia- 
tion to make it a thoroughly effective force. 

Many of the products and crops lend themselves 
well to this kind of admiration, and all of them 
should awaken gratitude and reverence. Sermons 
and teaching may issue from them. Nor is it nec- 
essary that this gratitude be expressed only in col- 
lected materials, or that all preaching and all teach- 
ing shall be indoors. The best understanding of our 
relations to the earth will be possible when we 
learn how to apply our devotions in the open places. 



114 



The keeping of the beautiful earth 

The proper care-taking of the earth Ues not alone 
in maintaining its fertiUty or in safeguarding its 
products. The Hues of beauty that appeal to the 
eye and the charm that satisfies the five senses are 
in our keeping. 

The natural landscape is always interesting and it 
is satisfying. The physical universe is the source of 
art. We know no other form and color than that 
which we see in nature or derive from it. If art is 
true to its theme, it is one expression of morals. 
If it is a moral obligation to express the art-sense 
in painting and sculpture and literature and music, 
so is it an equal obligation to express it in good 
landscape. 

Of the first importance Is it that the race keep 
its artistic backgrounds, and not alone for the few 
who may travel far and near and who may pause 
deliberately, but also for those more numerous folk 
v/ho must remain with the daily toil and catch the 
far look only as they labor. To put the best ex- 
pression of any landscape into the consciousness of 
one's day's work is more to be desired than much 
riches. ^Vhen we complete our conquest, there will 
be no unseemly landscapes. 
115 



The Holy Earth 

The abundance of violated landscapes is proof 
that we have not yet mastered. The farmer does 
not have full command of his situation until the 
landscape is a part of his farming. Farms may be 
units in well-developed and pleasing landscapes, 
beautiful in their combinations with other farms 
and appropriate to their setting as well as attrac- 
tive in themselves. 

No one has a moral right to contribute unsightly 
factory premises or a forbidding commercial estab- 
lishment to any community. The lines of utility 
and eJEciency ought also to be the lines of beauty; 
and it is due every worker to have a good land- 
scape to look upon, even though its area be very 
constricted. To produce bushels of wheat and mar- 
vels of machinery, to maintain devastating mili- 
tary establishments, do not comprise the sum of con- 
quest. The backgrounds must be kept. 

If moral strength comes from good and sufficient 
scenery, so does the preservation of it become a 
social duty. It is much more than a civic obliga- 
tion. But the resources of the earth must be avail- 
able to man for his use and this necessarily means 
a modification of the original scenery. Some pieces 
and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and 
should be kept wholly in the natural state. Much 
of it may yield to modification if he takes good 
care to preserve its essential features. Unfortu- 
116 



The Keeping of the Beautiful Earth 

nately, the engineer seems not often to be trained 
in the values of scenery and he is Hkely to despoil a 
landscape or at least to leave it raw and unfinished. 
On the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling 
abroad that any modification of a striking land- 
scape is violation and despoliation; and unwar- 
ranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost 
to prudery, follows any needful work of utilization. 
Undoubtedly the farmer and builder and promoter 
have been too unmindful of the effect of their in- 
terference on scenery, and particularly in taking 
little care in the disposition of wastes and in the 
healing of wounds; but a work either of farming 
or of construction may add interest and even lines 
of beauty to a landscape and endow it with the sug- 
gestion of human interest. If care were taken in 
the construction of public and semi-public work to 
reshape the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, 
to care for, to plant, to erect structures of good 
proportions whether they cost much or little, and 
to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the 
communities, most of the present agitation against 
interference with natural scenery would disappear. 
One has only to visit the factory districts, the va- 
cation resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of 
streams and gorges, to look at the faces of cliffs 
and at many engineering enterprises and at num- 
berless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard 
117 



The Holy Earth 

of men for the materials that they handle. It is as 
much our obligation to hold the scenery reverently 
as to handle the products reverently. Man found 
the earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden. 
The keeping of the good earth depends on preser- 
vation rather than on destruction. The office of 
the farmer and the planter is to produce rather than 
to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that 
they may produce more abundantly; these persons 
are therefore natural care-takers. If to this office 
we add the habit of good housekeeping, we shall 
have more than one-third of our population at once 
directly partaking in keeping the earth. It is one 
of the bitter ironies that farmers should ever have 
been taken out of their place to wreak vengeance 
on the earth by means of military devastation. In 
the past, this ravage has been small in amount be- 
cause the engines of destruction were weak, but with 
the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is 
awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the 
improvement of agriculture and other agencies of 
conservation, it is yet a fact that man has never 
been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the 
skill of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject 
that we have already approached from another 
point of view). The keeping of the earth is there- 
fore involved in the organization of society. Mili- 
tary power heads toward destructiveness. Civil 
118 



The Keeping of the Beautiful Earth 

power heads toward conservation. The miHtary 
power may be constructive in times of peace, but 
its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation 
and the inflicting of injury. When the civil power 
is subjugated to the military power, society is 
headed toward calamity. 

To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not 
only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of 
ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of 
human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible 
supplies of copper and petroleum and other unre- 
newable materials that by every right and equity 
belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to 
make these successors pay for the destruction of 
their heritage. Day by day we are mortgaging the 
future, depriving it of supplies that it may need, 
burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn. 

Merely to make the earth productive and to keep 
it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its prod- 
ucts, is the special prerogative of a good agriculture 
and a good citizenry founded thereon ; this may seem 
at the moment to be small and ineffective as against 
mad impersonal and limitless havoc, but it carries 
the final healing; and while the land worker will bear 
much of the burden on his back he will also redeem 
the earth. 



119 



The tones of industry 

One of the clearest notes of our time is the recog- 
nition of the hohness of industry and the attempt 
to formulate the morals of it. We accept this fact 
indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the 
laboring man his due. 

The handworker is more or less elemental, deal- 
ing directly with the materials. We begin to recog- 
nize these industries in literature, in sculpture, and 
in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or 
effectively translate them into music. 

It is to be recognized, of course, that melody is 
emotional and dynamic not imitative, that its power 
lies in suggestion rather than in direct representa- 
tion, and that its language is general; with all this 
I have nothing to do. Meunier has done much 
with his chisel to interpret the spirit of constructive 
labor and to develop its higher significance. His 
art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and 
music are not to be compared; yet it raises the 
question whether there may be other bold exten- 
sions of art. 

The primitive industries must have been mostly 
silent, when there were no iron tools, when fire 
120 



The Tones of Industry 

felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe, when 
the parts in construction were secured by thongs, 
and when the game was caught in silent traps or 
by the swift noiseless arrow and spear. Even at 
the Stone Age the rude implements and the ma- 
terials must have been mostly devoid of resonance. 
But now industry has become universal and com- 
plex, and it has also become noisy, — so noisy that 
we organize to protect ourselves from becoming 
distraught. 

And yet a workshop, particularly if it works in 
metal, is replete with tones that are essentially 
musical. Workmen respond readily to unison. 
There are melodies that arise from certain kinds 
of labor. Much of our labor is rhythmic. In any 
factory driven by power, there is a fundamental 
rhythm and motion, tying all things together. I 
have often thought, standing at the threshold of a 
mill, that it might be possible somewhere by care- 
ful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to 
organize the work as to develop a better expression 
in labor. Very much do we need to make industry 
vocal. 

It is worth considering, also, whether it is possible 
to take over into music any of these sounds of in- 
dustry in a new way, that they may be given mean- 
ings they do not now possess. 

At all events, the poetic element in industry is 
121 



The Holy Earth 

capable of great development and of progressive in- 
terpretation; and poetry is scarcely to be dis- 
sociated from sound. All good work well done is 
essentially poetic to the sensitive mind; and when 
the work is the rhythm of many men acting in 
unison, the poetry has voice. • 

The striking of the rivet 

The purr of a drill 

The crash of a steam-shovel 

The plunge of a dredge 

The buzz of a saw 

The roll of belts and chains 

The whirl of spindles 

The hiss of steam 

The tip-tap of valves 

The undertone rumble of a mill 

The silence intent of men at work 

The talk of men going to their homes,— 

These are all the notes of great symphonies. 

Nor should I stop with the industries of com- 
merce and manufacture. There are many possibil- 
ities in the sounds and voices that are known of 
fisherfolk and campers and foresters and farmers. 
Somehow we should be able to individualize these 
voices and to give them an artistic expression in 
some kind of human composition. There are rich 
suggestions in the voices of the farmyard, the calls 
of wild creatures, the tones of farm implements and 
machmery, the sounds of the elements, and par- 
122 



The Tones of Industry 

ticularly in the relations of all these to the pauses, 
the silences, and the distances beyond. 

Whether it is possible to utilize any of these 
tones and voices artistically is not for a layman to 
say; but the layman may express the need that he 
feels. 



123 



The threatened literature 

A fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitive- 
ness and exactness of science will deprive literature 
of imagination and sympathy and will destroy ar- 
tistic expression; and it is said that we are in dan- 
ger of losing the devotional element in literature. 
If these apprehensions are well founded, then do 
we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is an 
immeasurable resource. 

Great Hterature may be relatively independent 
of time and place, and this is beyond discussion 
here; but if the standards of interpretative litera- 
ture are lowering it must be because the standards 
of life are lowering, for the attainment and the out- 
look of a people are bound to be displayed in its 
letters. 

Perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods 
and standards rather than in essential qualities. 
We constantly acquire new material for literary use. 
The riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever 
before. It would be strange indeed if the new 
experience of the planet did not express itself in 
new literary form. 

We are led astray by the fatal habit of making 
comparisons, contrasting one epoch with another. 
^24 



The Threatened Literature 

There may be inflexible souls among the investiga- 
tors who see little or nothing beyond the set of 
facts in a little field, but surely the greater number 
of scientific men are persons of keen imagination 
and of broad interest in all conquests. Indeed, a 
lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the 
best attainments in science; it is necessary only 
that the imagination be regulated and trained. 
Never has it been so true that fact is stranger than 
fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been 
so evenly matched by the flights of science. All 
great engineers, chemists, physiologists, physicists 
work in the realm of imagination, of imagination 
that projects the unknown from the known. Al- 
most do we think that the Roentgen ray, the wire- 
less telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the stars, 
the serum control of disease are the product of 
what we might call pure fancy. The very utilities 
and conquests of modern society are the results of 
better imagination than the world has yet known. 
If it is true that the desire to measure and to analyze 
is now an established trait, equally is it true that it 
directs the mind into far and untried reaches; and 
if we have not yet found this range of inspiration 
in what is called artistic literature, it must be be- 
cause literary criticism has not accepted the im- 
agery of the modern world and is still looking for 
its art to the models of the past. 
125 



The Holy Earth 

The models of the past are properly the stand- 
ards for the performances of their time, but this 
does not constitute them the standards of all time 
or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of lan- 
guage for the sake of writing it is losing its hold; 
but a new, clear, and forceful literature appears. 
This new literature has its own criteria. It would 
be violence to judge it only by standards of criti- 
cism founded on Elizabethan writings. We do not 
descend into crude materialism because we describe 
the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate 
imagination because we desire that it shall have 
meaning; we do not strip literature of artistic qual- 
ity because it is true to the facts and the outlook 
of our own time. 

It may be admitted that present literature is in- 
adequate, and that we are still obliged to go to the 
former compositions for our highest artistic expres- 
sions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never 
cease to want these older literatures. Let us hope 
that we shall never be severed from our past. But 
perhaps the good judge in a coming generation, when 
the slow process of elimination has perfected its 
criticism, will discover something very noble and 
even very artistic in the abundant writing of our 
day. Certainly he will note the recovery from the 
first excess of reaction against the older orders, and 
he will be aware that at this epoch man began anew 
126 



The Threatened Literature 

to express his social sense in a large way, as a result 
of all his painstaking studies in science. Even if he 
should not discover the highest forms of literary 
expression, he might find that here was the large 
promise of a new order. Possibly he would dis- 
cover major compositions of the excellence of which 
we ourselves are not aware. 

It is less than forty years since Darwin and less 
than fifty years since Agassiz. It is only twenty 
years since Pasteur. It is only a century and a 
quarter since Franklin, fifty years since Faraday, 
less than twenty-five since Tyndall. It is sixty 
years since Humboldt glorified the earth with the 
range of his imagination. It is not so very far even 
if we go back to Newton and to Kepler. Within 
the span of a century we count name after name of 
prophets who have set us on a new course. So com- 
plete has been the revolution that we lost our old 
bearings before we had found the new. We have 
not yet worked out the new relationships, nor put 
into practice their moral obligations, nor have we 
grasped the fulness of our privileges. We have not 
yet made the new knowledge consciously into a 
philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into 
working attitudes of social equity. Therefore, not 
even now are we ripe for the new literature. 

We have gone far enough, however, to know that 
science is not unsympathetic and that it is not con- 
127 



The Holy Earth 

temptuous of the unknown. By lens and prism and 
balance and line we measure minutely whatever we 
can sense; then with bared heads we look out to 
the great unknown and we cast our lines beyond 
the stars. There are no realms beyond which the 
prophecy of science would not go. It resolves the 
atom and it weighs the planets. 

Among the science men I have found as many 
poetic souls as among the literary men, although 
they may not know so much poetry, and they are 
not equally trained in literary expression; being 
free of the restraint of conventional criticism, they 
are likely to have a peculiarly keen and sympathetic 
projection. Close dissection long continued may 
not lead to free artistic literary expression; this is 
as true of literary anatomy as of biological anatomy : 
but this does not destroy the freedom of other souls, 
and it may afford good material for the artist. 

Two kinds of popular writing are confused in the 
public mind, for there are two classes that express 
the findings of scientific inquiry. The prevailing 
product is that which issues from establishments and 
institutions. This is supervised, edited, and made to 
conform; it is the product of our perfected organ- 
izations and has all the hardness of its origin. The 
other literature is of a different breed. It is the 
expression of personality. The one is a useful and 
necessary public literature of record and advice; the 
128 



The Threatened Literature 

other is a literature of outlook and inspiration. The 
latter is not to be expected from the institutions, 
for it IS naturally the literature of freedom. 

My reader now knows my line of approach to 
the charge that literature is in danger of losing its 
element of devotion, and hereby lies the main reason 
for introducing this discussion into my little book. 
We may be losing the old literary piety and the 
technical theology, because we are losing the old 
theocratic outlook on creation. We also know that 
the final control of human welfare will not be gov- 
ernmental or military, and we shall some day learn 
that it will not be economic as we now prevailingly 
use the word^ We have long since forgotten that 
once it was patriarchal. We shall know the creator 
in the creation. We shall derive more of our solaces 
from the creation and in the consciousness of our 
right relations to it. We shall be more fully aware 
that righteousness inheres in honest occupation. 
We shall find some bold and free way in which] the 
human spirit may express itself. 



129 



The separate soul 

Many times in this journey have we come against 
the importance of the individual. We are to de- 
velop the man's social feeling at the same time 
that we allow him to remain separate. We are to 
accomplish certain social results otherwise than by 
the process of thronging, which is so much a part 
of the philosophy of this anxious epoch; and there- 
fore we may pursue the subject still a little further. 

Any close and worth-while contact with the earth 
tends to make one original or at least detached in 
one's judgments and independent of group control. 
In proportion as society becomes organized and in- 
volved, do we need the separate spirit and persons 
who are responsible beings on their own account. 
The independent judgment should be much furthered 
by studies in the sciences that are founded on obser- 
vation of native forms and conditions. And yet the 
gains of scientific study become so rigidly organized 
into great enterprises that the individual is likely 
to be lost in them. 

As an example of what I mean, I mention John 
Muir, who has recently passed away, and who stood 
for a definite contribution to his generation. He 
130 



The Separate Soul 

could hardly have made this contribution if he had 
been attached to any of the great institutions or 
organizations or to big business. He has left a 
personal impression and a remarkable literature 
that has been very little influenced by group psy- 
chology. He is the interpreter of mountains, for- 
ests, and glaciers. 

There is one method of aggregation and social 
intercourse. There is another method of isolation 
and separateness. Never in the open country do I 
see a young man or woman at nightfall going down 
the highways and the long fields but I think of the 
character that develops out of the loneliness, in 
the silence of vast surroundings, projected against 
the backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must 
come from these situations as contrasted with those 
that arise from the babble of the crowds. There is 
hardiness in such training; there is independence, 
the taking of one's own risk and no need of the pro- 
tection of compensation-acts. There is no over- 
imposed director to fall back on. Physical recu- 
peration is in the situation. As against these fields, 
much of the habitual golf and tennis and other ad- 
ventitious means of killing time and of making up 
deficiencies is almost ludicrous. 

Many of our reformers fail because they express 
only a group psychology and do not have a living 
personal interpretation. Undoubtedly many per- 
131 



The Holy Earth 

sons who might have had a message of their own 
have lost it and have also lost the opportunity to 
express it by belonging to too many clubs and by too 
continuous association with so-called kindred spirits, 
or by taking too much post-graduate study. It is a 
great temptation to join many clubs, but if one feels 
any stir of originality in himself, he should be cau- 
tious how he joins. 

I may also recall the great example of Agassiz at 
Penikese, In his last year, broken in health, feeling 
the message he still had for the people, he opened 
the school on the little island off the coast of Massa- 
chusetts. It was a short school in one summer only, 
yet it has made an indelible impression on American 
education. It stimulates one to know that the per- 
son who met the incoming students on the wharf was 
Agassiz himself, not an assistant or an instructor. 
Out of the great number of applicants, he chose fifty 
whom he would teach. He wanted to send forth 
these chosen persons with his message, apostles to 
carry the methods and the way of approach. (When 
are we to have the Penikese for the rural back- 
grounds ?) 

Sometime there will be many great unattached 
teachers, who will choose their own pupils because 
they want them and not merely because the appli- 
cants have satisfied certain arbitrary tests. The 
students may be graduates of colleges or they may 
132 



The Separate Soul 

be others. They will pursue their work not for 
credit or for any other reward. We shall yet come 
back to the masters, and there will be teaching in 
the market-places. 

We are now in the epoch of great organization 
not only in industrial developments but also in ed- 
ucational and social enterprises, in religious work, 
and in governmental activities. So completely is 
the organization proceeding in every direction, and 
so good is it, that one habitually and properly de- 
sires to identify oneself with some form of associ- 
ated work. Almost in spite of oneself, one is caught 
up into the plan of things, and becomes part of a 
social, economic, or educational mechanism. No 
longer do we seek our educational institutions so 
much for the purpose of attaching ourselves to a 
master as to pursue a course of study. No more 
do we sit at the feet of Gamaliel. 

In government, the organization has recently 
taken the form of mechanism for efficiency. We 
want government and all kinds of organization to 
be efficient and effective, but administrative effi- 
ciency may easily proceed at the expense of person- 
ality. Much of our public organization for effi- 
ciency is essentially monarchic in its tendency. It 
is likely to eliminate the most precious resource in 
human society, which is the freedom of expression 
of the competent individual. We are piling organ- 

13a 



The Holy Earth 

ization on organization, one supervising and watch- 
ing and "investigating" the other. The greater the 
number of the commissions, investigating commit- 
tees, and the interlocking groups, the more complex 
does the whole process become and the more diffi- 
cult is it for the person to find himself. We can 
never successfully substitute bookkeeping for men 
and women. We are more in need of personality 
than of administrative regularity. 

This is not a doctrine of laisser-faire or let-alone. 
The very conditions of modern society demand 
strong control and regulation and vigorous organ- 
ization; but the danger is that we apply the con- 
trols uniformly and everywhere and eliminate the 
free action of the individual, as if control were in 
itself a merit. 

In some way we must protect the person from 
being submerged in the system. We need always to 
get back of the group to the individual. The per- 
son is the reason for the group, although he is re- 
sponsible to the group. 

It is probably a great advantage to our democ- 
racy that our educational institutions are so com- 
pletely organized, for by that means we are able to 
educate many more persons and to prepare them 
for the world with a clear and direct purpose in life. 
But this is not the whole of the public educational 
process. Some of the most useful persons cannot 
134 



The Separate Soul 

express themselves in institutions. This is not the 
fault of the institutions. In the nature of their 
character, these persons are separate. For the most 
part, they do not now have adequate means of self- 
expression or of contributing themselves to the pub- 
lic welfare. 

When we shall have completed the present neces- 
sity of consolidation, centralization, and organiza- 
tion, society will begin to be conscious of the sepa- 
rate souls, who in the nature of the case must stand 
by themselves, and it will make use of them for the 
public good. Society will endow persons, not on a 
basis of salary, and enable them thereby to teach in 
their own way and their own time. This will rep- 
resent one of the highest types of endowment by 
government and society. 

We begin to approach this time by the support, 
through semi-public agencies, of persons to accom- 
plish certain results or to undertake special pieces 
of work, particularly of research; but we have not 
yet attained the higher aim of endowing individuals 
to express themselves personally. There are liber- 
ated personalities, rare and prophetic, who are con- 
sumed only in making a living but who should be 
given unreservedly to the people: the people are 
much in need. 

Never have we needed the separate soul so much 
as now. 

135 



The element of separateness in society 

If it is so important that we have these separate 
souls, then must we inquire where they may be 
found and particularly how we may insure the req- 
uisite supply. Isolated separates appear here and 
there, in all the ranges of human experiences; these 
cannot be provided or foretold; but we shall need, 
in days to come, a group or a large class of persons, 
who in the nature of their occupation, situation, 
and training are relatively independent and free. 
We need more than a limited number of strong out- 
standing figures who rise to personal leadership. 
We must have a body of unattached laborers and 
producers who are in sufiicient numbers to influence 
unexpressed public opinion and who will form a 
natural corrective as against organization-men, 
habitual reformers, and extremists. 

It is apparent that such a class must own pro- 
ductive property, be able to secure support by work- 
ing for themselves, and produce supplies that are 
indispensable to society. Their individual inter- 
ests must be greater and more insistent than their 
associative interests. They should be in direct eon- 
tact with native resources. This characterization 
136 



The Element of Separateness in Society 

describes the farmer, and no other large or impor- 
tant group. 

We have considered, on a former page, that we 
are not to look for the self-acting individuals among 
the workingmen as a class. They are rapidly par- 
taking in an opposite development. They are 
controlled by associative interests. Even under a 
profit-sharing system they are parts in a close 
concert. 

How to strike the balance between the needful 
individualism and social crystallization is probably 
the most difficult question before society. Of the 
great underlying classes of occupations, farming is 
the only one that presents the individualistic side 
very strongly. If individualism is to be preserved 
anywhere, it must be preserved here. The tendency 
of our present-day discussion is to organize the 
farmers as other groups or masses are organized. 
We are in danger here. Assuredly, the farmer needs 
better resources in association, but it is a nice 
question how far we should go and how completely 
we should try to redirect him. Fortunately, the 
holding of title to land and the separateness of 
farm habitations prevent solidification. If, on this 
individualism and without destroying it, we can de- 
velop a co-acting and co-operating activity, we shall 
undoubtedly be on the line of safety as well as on 
the line of promise. It would be a pity to organize 
137 



The Holy Earth 

the farming people merely to secure them their 
"rights." We ought soon to pass this epoch in 
civilization. There are no " rights '' exclusive to any 
class. "Rights" are not possessions. 

I do not know where the element of separateness 
in society is to be derived unless it comes out of 
the earth. 

Given suflBcient organization to enable the farmer 
to express himself fully in his occupation and to 
secure protection, then we may well let the matter 
rest until his place in society develops by the opera- 
tion of natural forces. We cannot allow the fun- 
damental supplies from the common earth to be 
controlled by arbitrary class regulation. It would 
be a misfortune if the farmer were to isolate himself 
by making "demands" on society. I hope that the 
farmer's obligation may be so sensitively developed 
in him as to produce a better kind of mass-cohesion 
than we have yet known. 



138 



The democratic basis in agriculture 

All these positions are capable of direct appli- 
cation in the incorporation of agriculture into a 
scheme of democracy. A brief treatment of this 
subject I had developed for the present book; and 
this treatment, with applications to particular situ- 
ations now confronting us, I used recently in the 
vice-presidential address before the new Section M 
of the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science (published in Science, February 26, 1915, 
where the remainder of it may be found). Some of 
the general points of view, modified from that ad- 
dress, may be brought together here. The desirabil- 
ity of keeping a free and unattached attitude m the 
people on the land may be expounded in many di- 
rections, but for my purpose I will confine the illus- 
trations to organization in the field of education. 

The agricultural situation is now much in the 
public mind. It is widely discussed in the press, 
which shows that it has news value. Much of this 
value is merely of superficial and temporary inter- 
est. Much of it represents a desire to try new rem- 
edies for old ills. Many of these remedies will not 
work. We must be prepared for some loss of pub- 
139 



The Holy Earth 

lie interest in them as time goes on. We are now 
in a publicity stage of our rural development. It 
would seem that the news-gathering and some other 
agencies discover these movements after the work 
of many constructive spirits has set them going and 
has laid real foundations; and not these founda- 
tions, but only detached items of passing interest, 
may be known of any large part of the public. I 
hope that we shall not be disturbed by this circum- 
stance nor let it interfere with good work or with 
fundamental considerations, however much we may 
deplore the false expectations that may result. 

We are at the parting of the ways. For years 
without number — for years that run into the cen- 
turies when men have slaughtered each other on 
many fields, thinking that they were on the fields 
of honor, when many awful despotisms have ground 
men into the dust, the despotisms thinking them- 
selves divine — for all these years there have been 
men on the land wishing to see the light, trying to 
make mankind hear, hoping but never realizing. 
They have been the pawns on the great battlefields, 
men taken out of the peasantries to be hurled against 
other men they did not know and for no rewards 
except further enslavement. They may even have 
been developed to a high degree of manual or tech- 
nical skill that they might the better support gov- 
ernments to make conquests. They have been on 
140 



The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 
the bottom, upholding the whole superstructure and 
pressed into the earth by the weight of it. When 
the final history is written, the lot of the man on 
the land will be the saddest chapter. 

But in the nineteenth century, the man at the 
bottom began really to be recognized politically. 
This recognition is of two kinds,-the use that a gov- 
ernment can make in its own interest of a highly 
efficient husbandry, and the desire to give the hus- 
bandman full opportunity and full justice. I hope 
that in these times the latter motive always pre- 
vails. It is the only course of safety. 

Great public-service institutions have now been 
founded in the rural movement. The United States 
Department of Agriculture has grown to be one ot 
the notable governmental establishments^ of the 
world, extending itself to a multitude of interests 
and operating with remarkable effectiveness. The 
chain of colleges ot agriculture and expermaent sta- 
tions, generously co-operative between nation and 
State, is unlike any other development anywhere 
meaning more, I think, for the future welfare and 
peace of the people than any one of us yet foresees. 
There is the finest fraternalism, and yet without 
clannishness, between these great agencies setting 
a good example in public service. And to these 
agencies we are to add the State departments of 
agriculture, the work of private endowments al- 
141 



The Holy Earth 

though yet in its infancy, the growing and very 
desirable contact with the rural field of many in- 
stitutions of learning. All these agencies comprise 
a distinctly modern phase of public activity. 

A new agency has been created in the agricul- 
tural extension act which was signed by President 
Wilson on the 8th of May in 1914. The farmer is to 
find help at his own door. A new instrumentahty in 
the world has now received the sanction of a whole 
people and we are just beginning to organize it. The 
organization must be extensive, and it ought also to 
be liberal. No such national plan on such a scale 
has ever been attempted; and it almost staggers 
one when one even partly comprehends the tremen- 
dous consequences that in all likelihood will come 
of it. The significance of it is not yet grasped by 
the great body of the people. 

Now, the problem is to relate all this public work 
to the development of a democracy. I am not 
thinking so much of the development of a form of 
government as of a real democratic expression on 
the part of the people. Agriculture is our basic 
industry. As we organize its affairs, so to a great 
degree shall we secure the results in society in gen- 
eral. It is very important in our great experiment 
in democracy that we do not lose sight of the first 
principle in democracy, which is to let the control 
of policies and affairs rest directly back on the 
people. 

142 



The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 

We have developed the institutions on public 
funds to train the farmer and to give him voice. 
These institutions are of vast unportance in the 
founding of a people. The folk are to be developed 
in themselves rather than by class legislation, or by 
favor of government, or by any attitude of benevo- 
lence from without. 

Whether there is any danger in the organization 
of our new nationalized extension work, and the 
other public rural agencies, I suppose not one of us 
knows. But for myself, I have apprehension of the 
tendency to make some of the agricultural work into 
" projects " at Washington and elsewhere. If we are 
not careful, we shall not only too much centralize 
the work, but we shall tie it up in perplexing red- 
tape, official obstacles, and bookkeeping. The merit 
of the projects themselves and the intentions of the 
officers concerned in them are not involved in what 
I say; I speak only of the tendency of all govern- 
ment to formality and to crystallization, to machine 
work and to armchair regulations; and even at the 
risk of a somewhat lower so-called "efficiency,'' I 
should prefer for such work as investigating and 
teaching in agriculture, a dispersion of the initia- 
tive and responsibility, letting the co-ordination and 
standardizing arise very much from conference and 
very little from arbitrary regulation. 

The best project anywhere is a good man or 
woman working in a program, but unhampered. 
143 



The Holy Earth 

If it is important that the administration of agri- 
cultural work be not overmuch centralized at Wash- 
ington, it is equally true that it should not be too 
much centralized in the States. I hear that persons 
who object strongly to federal concentration may 
nevertheless decline to give the counties and the 
communities in their own States the benefit of any 
useful starting-power and autonomy. In fact, I am 
inclined to think that here at present lies one of our 
greatest dangers. 

A strong centralization within the State may be 
the most hurtful kind of concentration, for it may 
more vitally affect the people at home. Here the 
question, remember, is not the most efficient formal 
administration, but the best results for the people. 
The farm-bureau work, for example, can never pro- 
duce the background results of which it is capable 
if it is a strongly intrenched movement pushed out 
from one centre, as from the college of agriculture 
or other institution. The college may be the guid- 
ing force, but it should not remove responsibility 
from the people of the localities, or offer them a 
kind of co-operation that is only the privilege of 
partaking in the college enterprises. I fear that 
some of our so-called co-operation in public work 
of many kinds is little more than to allow the co- 
operator to approve what the official administration 
has done. 

144 



The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 

In the course of our experience in democracy, we 
have developed many checks against too great cen- 
tralization. I hope that we may develop the checks 
effectively in this new welfare work in agriculture, 
a desire that I am aware is also strong with many 
of those who are concerned in the planning of it. 

Some enterprises may be much centralized, 
whether in a democracy or elsewhere; an example 
is the postal service: this is on the business side of 
government. Some enterprises should be decen- 
tralized; an example is a good part of the agricul- 
tural service: this is on the educational side of 
government. It is the tendency to reduce all pub- 
lic work to uniformity; yet there is no virtue m 
uniformity. Its only value is as a means to an 

end. 

Thus far, the rural movement has been whole- 
somely democratic. It has been my privilege for 
one-third of a century to have known rather closely 
many of the men and women who have been in- 
strumental in bringing the rural problem to its pres- 
ent stage of advancement. They have been public- 
minded, able, far-seemg men and women, and they 
have rendered an unmeasurable service. The rural 
movement has been brought to its present state 
without any demand for special privilege, without 
bolstering by factitious legislation, and to a remark- 
able degree without self-seeking. It is based on a 
145 



The Holy Earth 

real regard for the welfare of all the people, rather 
than for rural people exclusively. 

Thrice or more in this book I have spoken as if 
not convinced that the present insistence on "efl5- 
ciency" in government is altogether sound. That 
is exactly the impression I desire to convey. As 
the term is now commonly applied, it is not a mea- 
sure of good government. 

Certain phrases and certain sets of ideas gain 
dominance at certain times. Just now the idea of 
administrative efficiency is uppermost. It seems 
necessarily to be the controlling factor in the prog- 
ress of any business or any people. Certainly, a 
people should be efficient; but an efficient govern- 
ment may not mean an efficient people, — it may 
mean quite otherwise or even the reverse. The 
primary purpose of government in these days, and 
particularly in this country, is to educate and to 
develop all the people and to lead them to express 
themselves freely and to the full, and to partake 
politically. And this is what governments may not 
do, and this is where they may fail even when their 
efficiency in administration is exact. A monarchic 
form may be executively more efficient than a demo- 
cratic form; a despotic form may be more efficient 
than either. The justification of a democratic form 
of government lies in the fact that it is a means of 
education. 

146 



The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 

The final test of government is not executive ef- 
ficiency. Every movement, every circumstance that 
takes starting-power and incentive away from the 
people, even though it makes for exacter admin- 
istration, is to be challenged. It is specially to be 
deplored if this loss of starting-power affects the 
persons who deal first-hand with the surface of the 
planet and with the products that come directly 
out of it. 

There is a broad political significance to all this. 
Sooner or later the people rebel against intrenched 
or bureaucratic groups. Many of you know how 
they resist even strongly centralized departments of 
public instruction, and how the effectiveness of such 
departments may be jeopardized and much lessened 
by the very perfectness of their organization; and 
if they were to engage in a custom of extraneous 
forms of news-giving in the public press, the resent- 
ment would be the greater. In our rural work we 
are in danger of developing a piece of machinery 
founded on our fundamental industry; and if this 
ever comes about, we shall find the people organiz- 
ing to resist it. 

The reader will understand that in this discus- 
sion I assume the agricultural work to be systemati- 
cally organized, both in nation and State; this is es- 
sential to good effort and to the accomplishing of 
results: but we must take care that the formal or- 
147 



The Holy Earth 

ganization does not get in the way of the good work- 
ers, hindering and repressing them and wasting their 
time. 

We want governments to be economical and effi- 
cient with funds and in the control of affairs; this 
also is assumed: but we must not overlook the 
larger issues. In all this new rural effort, we should 
maintain the spirit of team-work and of co-action, 
and not make the mistake of depending too much 
on the routine of centralized control. 

In this country we are much criticised for the 
cost of government and for the supposed control of 
affairs by monopoly. The cost is undoubtedly too 
great, but it is the price we pay for the satisfaction 
of using democratic forms. As to the other dis- 
ability, let us consider that society lies between two 
dangers, — the danger of monopoly and the danger 
of bureaucracy. On the one side is the control of 
the necessities of life by commercial organization. 
On the other side is the control of the necessities 
of life, and even of life itself, by intrenched groups 
that ostensibly represent the people and which it 
may be impossible to dislodge. Here are the Scylla 
and the Charybdis between which human society 
must pick its devious way. 

Both are evil. Of the two, monopoly may be 
the lesser: it may be more easily brought under 
control; it tends to be more progressive; it extends 
148 



The Democratic Basis in Agriculture 

less far; it may be the less hateful. They are only 
two expressions of one thing, one possibly worse 
than the other. Probably there are peoples who 
pride themselves on more or less complete escape 
from monopoly who are nevertheless suffering from 
the most deadening bureaucracy. 

Agriculture is in the foundation of the political, 
economic, and social structure. If we cannot de- 
velop starting-power in the background people, we 
cannot maintain it elsewhere. The greatness of all 
this rural work is to lie in the results and not in 
the methods that absorb so much of our energy. 
If agriculture cannot be democratic, then there is 
no democracy. 



149 



The background spaces. — The forest 

"This is the forest primeval." These are the 
significant words of the poet in EvangeHne. Per- 
haps more than any single utterance they have set 
the American youth against the background of the 
forest. 

The backgrounds are important. The life of 
every one of us is relative. We miss our destiny 
when we miss or forget our backgrounds. We lose 
ourselves. Men go off in vague heresies when they 
forget the conditions against which they live. Judg- 
ments become too refined and men tend to become 
merely disputatious and subtle. 

The backgrounds are the great unoccupied spaces. 
They are the large environments in which we live 
but which we do not make. The backgrounds are 
the sky with its limitless reaches; the silences of 
the sea; the tundra in pallid arctic nights; the des- 
erts with their prismatic colors ; the shores that gird 
the planet; the vast mountains that are beyond 
reach; the winds, which are the universal voice in 
nature; the sacredness of the night; the elemental 
simplicity of the open fields; and the solitude of 
the forest. These are the facts and situations 
150 



The Background Spaces 

that stand at our backs, to which we adjust cm- 
civilization, and by which we measure ourselves. 

The great conquest of mankind is the conquest 
of his natural conditions. We admire the man who 
overcomes: the sailor or navigator in hostile and 
unknown seas; the engineer who projects himself 
hard against the obstacles; the miner and the ex- 
plorer; the builder; the farmer who ameliorates the 
earth to man's use. 

But even though we conquer or modify the 
physical conditions against which we are set, never- 
theless the backgrounds will remain. I hope that 
we may always say "The forest primeval." I 
hope that some reaches of the sea may never be 
sailed, that some swamps may never be drained, 
that some mountain peaks may never be scaled, that 
some forests may never be harvested. I hope that 
some knowledge may never be revealed. 

Look at your map of the globe. Note how few 
are the areas of great congestion of population and 
of much human activity as compared with the vast 
and apparently empty spaces. How small are the 
spots that represent the cities and what a little 
part of the earth are the political divisions that are 
most in the minds of men ! We are likely to think 
that all these outlying and thinly peopled places 
are the wastes. I suspect that they contribute 
more to the race than v;e think. I am glad that 

151 



The Holy Earth 

there are still some places of mystery, some reaches 
of hope, some things far beyond us, some spaces to 
conjure up dreams. I am glad that the earth is 
not all Iowa or Belgium or the Channel Islands. 
I am glad that some of it is the hard hills of New- 
England, some the heathered heights of Scotland, 
some the cold distances of Quebec, some of it the 
islands far off in little- traversed seas, and some of 
it also the unexplored domains that lie within eye- 
sight of our own homes. It is well to know that 
these spaces exist, that there are places of escape. 
They add much to the ambition of the race; they 
make for strength, for courage, and for renewal. 

In the cities I am always interested in the va- 
riety of the contents of the store windows. Vari- 
ously fabricated and disguised, these materials come 
from the ends of the earth. They come from the 
shores of the seas, from the mines, from the land, 
from the forests, from the arctic, and from the tropic. 
They are from the backgrounds. The cities are 
great, but how much greater are the forests and 
the sea ! 

No people should be forbidden the influence of 
the forest. No child should grow up without a 
knowledge of the forest; and I mean a real forest 
and not a grove or village trees or a park. There 
are no forests in cities, however many trees there 
may be. As a city is much more than a collection 
152 



The Background Spaces 

of houses, so is a forest much more than a collec- 
tion of trees. The forest has its own round of life, 
its characteristic attributes, its climate, and its in- 
habitants. When you enter a real forest you enter 
the solitudes, you are in the unexpressed distances. 
You walk on the mould of years and perhaps of 
ages. There is no other wind like the wind of the 
forest; there is no odor like the odor of the forest; 
there is no solitude more complete; there is no song 
of a brook like the song of a forest brook; there is 
no call of a bird like that of a forest bird; there 
are no mysteries so deep and which seem yet to be 
within one's realization. 

"While a forest is more than trees, yet the trees 
are the essential part of the forest; and no one ever 
really knows or understands a forest until he first 
understands a tree. There is no thing in nature 
finer and stronger than the bark of a tree; it is a 
thing in place, adapted to its ends, perfect in its 
conformation, beautiful in its color and its form 
and the sweep of its contour; and every bark is pe- 
culiar to its species. I think that one never really 
likes a tree until he is impelled to embrace it with 
his arms and to run his fingers through the grooves 
of its bark. 

Man listens in the forest. He pauses in the for- 
est. He finds himself. He loses himself in the town 
and even perhaps in the university. He may lose 
153 



The Holy Earth 

himself in business and in great affairs; but in the 
forest he is one with a tree, he stands by himself 
and yet has consolation, and he comes back to his 
own place in the scheme of things. We have almost 
forgotten to listen; so great and ceaseless is the 
racket that the little voices pass over our ears and 
we hear them not. I have asked person after per- 
son if he knew the song of the chipping-sparrow, 
and most of them are unaware that it has any 
song. We do not hear it in the blare of the city 
street, in railway travel, or when we are in a thun- 
derous crowd. We hear it in the still places and 
when our ears are ready to catch the smaller sounds. 
There is no music like the music of the forest, and 
the better part of it is faint and far away or high 
in the tops of trees. 

The forest may be an asylum. "The groves 
were God's first temples." We need all our altars 
and more, but we need also the sanctuary of the 
forest. It is a poor people that has no forests. I prize 
the farms because they have forests. It is a poor 
political philosophy that has no forests. It is a poor 
nation that has no forests and no workers in wood. 

In many places there are the forests. I think 
that we do not get the most out of them. Cer- 
tainly they have two uses: one for the products, 
and one for the human relief and the inspiration. 
I should like to see a movement looking toward 
154 



The Background Spaces 

the better utiHzation of the forests humanly, as we 
use school buildings and church buildings and public 
halls. I wish that we might take our friends to the 
forests as we also take them to see the works of the 
masters. For this purpose, we should not go in 
large companies. We need sympathetic guidance. 
Parties of two and four may go separately to the 
forests to walk and to sit and to be silent. I would 
not forget the forest in the night, in the silence and 
the simplicity of the darkness. Strangely few are 
the people who know a real forest at dark. Few 
are those who know the forest when the rain is fall- 
ing or when the snow covers the earth. Yet the 
forest is as real in all these moments as when the 
sun is at full and the weather is fair. 

I wish that we might know the forest intimately 
and sensitively as a part of our background. I 
think it would do much to keep us close to the 
verities and the essentials. 



155 



A forest background for a reformatory 

Some years ago I presented to a board that was 
charged with establishing and maintaining a new 
State reformatory for wayward and deUnquent 
boys an outHne of a possible setting for the enter- 
prise; and as this statement really constitutes a 
practical application of some of the foregoing dis- 
cussions, I present the larger part of it here. With 
delinquents it is specially important to develop the 
sense of obligation and responsibility, and I fear 
that we are endeavoring to stimulate this sense too 
exclusively by means of direct governing and dis- 
ciplinary methods. The statement follows. 

I think that the activities in the proposed refor- 
matory should be largely agricultural and industrial. 
So far as possible the young men should be put 
into direct contact with realities and with useful 
and practical work. An effort should be made to 
have all this work mean something to them and 
not to be merely make-believe. It is fairly pos- 
sible to develop such a property and organization 
as will put them in touch with real work rather 
than to force the necessity of setting tasks in order 
to keep them busy. 

156 



A Forest Background 

Aside from the manual labor part of it, the back- 
ground of the reformatory should be such as will 
develop the feeling of responsibiUty in the workers. 
This means that they must come actually in con- 
tact with the raw materials and with things as they 
grow. When a young man has a piece of wood or 
metal given to him in a shop, his whole respon- 
sibility is merely to make something out of this ma- 
terial; he has no responsibility for the material 
itself, as he would have if he had been obliged to 
mine it or to grow it. One of the greatest advan- 
tages of a farm training is that it develops a man's 
responsibility toward the materials with which he 
works. He is always brought face to face with the 
problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving 
the crops, saving the forests, and saving the live- 
stock. The idea of saving and safeguarding these 
materials is only incidental to those who do not 
help to produce them. 

It is important that the farm of this reformatory 
should be large enough so that all the young men 
may do some real pieces of work on it. Such a farm 
is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming 
sense. Its primary purpose is to aid in a reforma- 
tive or educational process. You should, therefore, 
undertake such types of farming as will best serve 
those needs and best meet the abilities of the in- 
mates. A very highly specialized farming, as the 
157 



The Holy Earth 

growing of truck-crops, would be quite impracti- 
cable as a commercial enterprise because this kind 
of farming demands the greatest skill and also be- 
cause it requires a property very easily accessible 
to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive 
to procure and difficult to find in large enough acre- 
age for an institution of this size; and it is doubt- 
ful whether this type of farming would have the 
best effect on the inmates. Of course, I should ex- 
pect that the institution would try to grow its own 
vegetables, but it would probably be unwise to 
make truck-gardening the backbone of the farming 
enterprise. I also feel that it would not be best to 
make it primarily a dairy farm or a fruit farm or 
a poultry farm, although all these things should 
be well represented on the place and in sufficient 
extent to supply the institution in whole or in part. 

There should be such a farming enterprise as 
would give a very large and open background, part 
of it practically wild, and which would allow for 
considerable freedom of action on the part of the 
inmates. You should have operations perhaps some- 
what in the rough and which would appeal to the 
manly qualities of the young men. It seems to me 
that a forestry enterprise would possibly be the best 
as the main part of the farming scheme. 

If the reformatory could have one thousand acres 
of forest, the area would provide a great variety of 
158 



A Forest Background 

conditions that the inmates would have to meet, it 
would give work in the building of roads and culverts 
and trails, it would provide winter activity at a time 
when the other farming enterprises are slack, it 
would bring the inmates directly in touch with wild 
and native life, and it would also place them against 
the natural resources in such a way as to make them 
feel their responsibility for the objects and the sup- 
plies. 

Perhaps it will be impossible to secure one thou- 
sand acres of good timber in a more or less continu- 
ous area. However, it might be possible to assemble 
a good number of contiguous farms in some of the 
hill regions so that one thousand acres of timber in 
various grades of maturity might be secured. There 
would be open spaces which ought to be planted, 
and this of itself would provide good work and 
supervision. The trimming, felling, and other care 
of this forest would be continuous. The forest should 
not be stripped, but merely the merchantable or 
ready timber removed from year to year, and the 
domain kept in a growing and recuperating condi- 
tion. One thousand acres of forest, in which timber 
is fit to be cut, should produce an annual increase 
of two hundred thousand to three hundred thou- 
sand board feet, and this increase should not lessen 
as the years go on. This timber should be manu- 
factured. I have not looked into the question as to 
159 



The Holy Earth 

whether a market could be found for the materials 
that would be made from this timber, but I should 
suppose that a market could be as readily secured 
for this kind of manufacture as for any other. The 
educational and moral effect of seeing the material 
grow, then caring for it, then harvesting it, and 
then manufacturing it would be very great. One 
could follow the process from beginning to end and 
feel a responsibiHty for it in every stage. I should 
suppose that the manufacture would be of small 
work and not merely the sawing of lumber. It 
might be well to determine whether there would be 
market for chairs, cabinets, and other furniture, 
whip-stocks, or small material that could be used 
in the manufacture of novelties and other like ar- 
ticles. Possibly the reformatory could supply some 
of the stock to the prisons that are manufacturing 
furniture, although the educational and moral ef- 
fects would be better if the inmates could see the 
process from beginning to end. 

Of course, you would not limit the manufactur- 
ing activities of the reformatory to wood-working. 
You probably would be obliged to have other kinds 
of factories, but the wood-working shops ought to 
be part of the plan and I should hope a very im- 
portant part. 

I have not made any careful study of this ques- 
tion, and do not know how feasible these sugges- 
160 



A Forest Background 

tions may be; but they appeal to me very strongly 
on the educational and reformational end. These 
suggestions are made only that they may be con- 
sidered along with other suggestions, and if they 
seem to be worth while, to have the question in- 
vestigated. 

If something like one thousand acres of land 
were secured for a forest, it would mean that the 
farm itself would be rather large. There ought to 
be probably not less than two or three hundred 
acres of land that might be used for grazing, gar- 
dens, and the ordinary farm operations that would 
contribute to the support of the inmates of the in- 
stitution. Of course, this arable land ought to be 
valley land or at least fairly level and accessible 
along good public highways. The forest land could 
be more remote, running back on the hills. If the 
property could be so located that the forest would 
control the sources of important streams and springs, 
the results would be all the better. The young men 
should feel their responsibility for creeks and ponds, 
and for the protection of wild life as well as for the 
crops that they raise. 

Where the reformatory should be located is a 
matter that should receive very careful attention. 
It is not alone the problem of finding a site that is 
proper for a reformatory, but also the question of so 
placing it that it will hnve some relation to State 
161 



The Holy Earth 

development and some connection with the people's 
interests and desires. State institutions should be so 
separated that the greatest number of people may see 
them or come into contact with them. I dislike the 
tendency to group the State institutions about cer- 
tain populous centres. In these days of easy trans- 
portation, the carrying problem is really of less im- 
portance than certain less definite but none the less 
real relations to all the people. There are certain 
great areas in the State of considerable population 
in which there are no State institutions, and in which 
the people know nothing about such affairs beyond 
the local school and church. Perhaps at first blush 
the people of a locality might not relish the idea of 
having a reformatory in their midst, but this feel- 
ing ought soon to pass away; and, moreover, the 
people should be made to feel their responsibility 
for reformatories, asylums, and penitentiaries as well 
as their responsibility for any other State institu- 
tions, and the feeling should not be encouraged 
that such institutions should be put somewhere else 
merely because one locality does not desire them. 

The character of the property that is purchased 
will determine to a very large extent the character 
of the institution, and, therefore, the nature of the 
reformatory processes. This is more important than 
transportation facilities. It is a more important 
question even than that of the proper buildings, for 
162 



A Forest Background 

buildings for these purposes have been studied by 
many experts and our ideas concerning them have 
been more or less standardized and, moreover, build- 
ings can be extended and modified more easily than 
can the landed area. It seems to me that before 
you think actually of purchasing the land, you 
should arrive at a fairly definite conclusion as to 
what kind of a farming enterprise it is desired to 
develop as a background for the institution; you 
could then determine as far as possible on principle 
in what general region the institution ought to be 
located; and then set out on a direct exploration to 
determine whether the proper kind and quantity of 
land can be secured. 



163 



The hacJcground spaces. — The open fields 

Here not long ago was the forest primeval. Here 
the trees sprouted, and grew their centuries, and 
returned to the earth. Here the midsummer brook 
ran all day long from the far-away places. Here 
the night-winds slept. Here havened the beasts 
and fowls when storms pursued them. Here the 
leaves fell in the glory of the autumn, here other 
leaves burst forth in the miracle of spring, and 
here the pewee called in the summer. Here the 
Indian tracked his game. 

It was not so very long ago. That old man's 
father remembers it. Then it was a new and holy 
land, seemingly fresh from the hand of the creator. 
The old man speaks of it as of a golden time, now 
far away and hallowed; he speaks of it with an at- 
titude of reverence. "Ah yes," my father told me; 
and calmly with bared head he relates it, every 
incident so sacred that not one hairbreadth must 
he deviate. The church and the master's school 
and the forest, — these three are strong in his 
memory. 

Yet these are not all. He remembers the homes 
cut in the dim wall of the forest. He recalls the 
farms full of stumps and heaps of logs and the ox- 
164 



The Open Fields 

teams on them, for these were in his boyhood. The 
ox-team was a natural part of the slow-moving con- 
quest in those rugged days. Roads betook them- 
selves into the forest, Hke great serpents devouring 
as they went. And one day, behold ! the forest was 
gone. Farm joined farm, the village grew, the old 
folk fell away, new people came whose names had 
to be asked. 

And I thought me why these fields are not as 
hallowed as were the old forests. Here are the same 
knolls and hills. In this turf there may be still 
the fibres of ancient trees. Here are the paths of 
the midsummer brooks, but vocal now only in the 
freshets. Here are the winds. The autumn goes 
and the spring comes. The pewee calls in the 
groves. The farmer and not the Indian tracks the 
plow. 

Here I look down on a little city. There is a 
great school in it. There are spires piercing the 
trees. In the distance are mills, and I see the smoke 
of good accomplishment roll out over the hillside. 
It is a self-centred city, full of pride. Every 
mile-post praises it. Toward it all the roads 
lead. It tells itself to all the surrounding country. 
And yet I cannot but feel that these quiet fields 
and others like them have made this city; but I 
am glad that the fields are not proud. 

One day a boy and one day a girl will go down 
165 



The Holy Earth 

from these fields, and out into the thoroughways of 
life. They will go far, but these hills they will 
still call home. 

From these uplands the waters flow down into 
the streams that move the mills and that float the 
ships. Loads of timber still go hence for the con- 
struction down below. Here go building-stones and 
sand and gravel, — gravel from the glaciers. Here 
goes the hay for ten thousand horses. Here go the 
wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. Here 
are the votes that hold the people steady. 

Somewhere there is the background. Here is the 
background. Here things move slowly. Trees grow 
slowly. The streams change little from year to year, 
and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this 
hill country. In yonder fence-row the catbird has 
built since I was a boy, and yet I have wandered 
far and I have seen great changes in yonder city. 
The well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: 
the wells are gone from the city. The cows have 
changed in color, but still they are cows and yield 
their milk in season. The fields do not perish, but 
time eats away the city. I think all these things 
must be good and very good or they could not 
have persisted in all this change. 

In the beginning ! Yes, I know, it was holy then. 
The forces of eons shaped it: still was it holy. The 
forest came: still holy. Then came the open fields. 
166 



The background spaces. — The ancestral sea 

The planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy 
as the soil. We speak of the "waste of waters," and 
we still offer prayers for those who go down to the 
sea in ships. 

Superstition yet clings about the sea. The lands- 
man thinks of the sea as barren, and he regrets that 
it is not solid land on which he may grow grass and 
cattle. And as one looks over the surface of the 
waters, with no visible object on the vast expanse 
and even the clouds lying apparently dead and ster- 
ile, and when one considers that three-fourths of 
the earth's surface is similarly covered, one has the 
impression of utter waste and desolation, with no 
good thing abiding there for the comfort and cheer 
of man. 

The real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the 
surface and every part is tenanted, so completely 
tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk of 
life, area for area, than does the solid land; and 
every atom of this life is as keen to live and fol- 
lows as completely the law of its existence as does 
the life of the interiors of the continents. The vast 
meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of 
organisms microscopic, form a layer for hundreds 
167 



The Holy Earth 

of feet beneath the surface and on which the great 
herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of 
the carnivora subsist. Every vertical region has its 
life, peculiar to it, extending even to the bottoms of 
the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness; 
and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper 
realms, like gentle primeval rains, afford a never- 
failing, never-ending source of food and maintain 
the slow life in the bottoms. We think of the huge 
animals of the sea when we think of mass, and it 
is true that the great whales are the bulkiest crea- 
tures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria, 
the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many 
other diminutive forms that everywhere populate 
the sea from the equator to the poles and provide 
the vast background of the ocean life. In these 
gulfs of moving unseen forms nitrification proceeds, 
and the rounds of life go on unceasingly. The levi- 
athan whale strains out these minute organisms from 
the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be 
his maw that his captors remove the accumulation 
with spades. The rivers bring down their freight 
of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the 
denizens of the sea. The last remains of all these 
multitudes are laid down on the ocean floors as or- 
ganic oozes; and nobody knows what part the abys- 
mal soil may play in the economy of the plant in 
some future epoch. 

168 



The Ancestral Sea 

The rains of the land come from the sea; the 
clouds come ultimately from the sea; the trade- 
winds flow regularly from the sea; the tempera- 
tures of the land surface are controlled largely from 
the sea; the high lands are washed into the sea as 
into a basin; if all the continents were levelled into 
the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about 
two miles deep. Impurities find their way into the 
sea and are there digested into the universal benefi- 
cence. We must reckon with the sea. 

It is supposed that the first life on the earth came 
forth where the land and the waters join, from that 
eternal interplay of cosmic forces where the solid 
and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet 
and marry. 

Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the 
planet. Its very vastness makes it significant. It 
show^s no age. Its deeps have no doubt existed 
from the solidification of the earth and they will 
probably remain when all works of man perish 
utterly. 

The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. 
Because man cannot set foot on it, the sea remains 
beyond his power to modify, to handle, and to con- 
trol. No breach that man may make but will im- 
mediately fill; no fleets of mighty ships go down 
but that the sea covers them in silence and knows 
them not; man may not hold converse with the 
169 



The Holy Earth 

monsters in the deeps. The sea is beyond him, 
surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing him with 
abundant benedictions. 

So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that 
man cannot sterilize it. He despoils none of its 
surface when he sails his ships. He does not anni- 
hilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer 
in its deluging, consuming soil. It controls him 
mightily. 

The seas and the shores have provided the trading 
ways of the peoples. The ocean connects all lands, 
surrounds all lands. Until recent times the great 
marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy 
water access of them. The polity of early settle- 
ments was largely the polity of the sea and the 
strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the 
first of the heroic human qualities. Probably all 
dry land was once under the sea, and therefrom has 
it drawn much of its power. 

From earliest times the sea has yielded property 
common to all and free to whomever would take it, 
— the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage of ships. 
Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. 
When government appropriates the wreckage of 
ships and the stranded derelict of the sea, the people 
may think it justifiable protection of their rights to 
secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws 
and customs and old restraints lose their force and 
170 



The Ancestral Sea 

vanish on the sea; and freedom rises out of the 
sea. 

And so the ocean has contributed to the making 
of the outlook of the human family. The race 
would be a very different race had there been no 
sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears 
and stimulating hopes, bringing its freight, bearing 
tidings of far lands, sundering traditions, rolling the 
waves of its elemental music, driving its rank smells 
into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul. 



171 



